Great news! We are excited to announce that our Executive Director and Founder, Wawira Njiru was awarded the UN Person of the Year 2021 for her work and visionary leadership towards #Feedingthefuture.
Missed out on her speech, not to worry! Read all about it here:
“Millions of children in low-income countries go to school hungry. In Kenya, 1 in every 4 children is stunted due to poor nutrition. Ina country where 46% of the population lives in extreme poverty and 51% are food insecure, access to adequate quantities of nutritious food remains a challenge for many. Chronic and acute undernutrition and micronutrient deficiencies continue to be a persistent critical issue in many regions due to low food production and broken food systems.
Hungry children cannot grow or learn. Hunger has devastating effects on their health, school performance and ability to learn, subsequently hindering productivity and potential. Statistics have shown that stunted children grow up to earn 22% less than non-stunted children while non-stunted childrenhave a 33% chance of getting out of poverty compared to children who are stunted.
School feeding programs are positioned to be a springboard for food system transformation, simultaneously improving education systems, enabling sustainable food systems, and improving child health and nutrition, consequently unraveling a population from the shackles of poverty. In line with the core mission of The School Meals Coalition, we have implemented a sustainable school feeding model that is a driver of social-economic recovery from the global pandemic and a tool for accelerated action on Sustainable Development Goals.
Today as we celebrate the 76th anniversary of the United Nations and its founding charter, we take time to reflect on Building Back Together for Peace and Prosperity. Regenerating our efforts to sustainable advancements that make the world a better place for people to thrive and prosper.
Food for Education is a social enterprise leveraging community, parent, and government partnerships at scale to expand national school feeding programs. Led by African women, we leverage technology and smart supply chains to source fresh, nutritious, local ingredients from smallholder farmers; simplify distribution; and enable parent and community participation and support to bring high-quality daily school meals to children, and thereby enable the most vulnerable to learn much more effectively.
In the next five years, we aim to feed more than 1,000,000 children every day in urban and peri-urban schools across Kenya without philanthropic support. After this, our ultimate long-term goal is to leverage this approach to expand national school feeding programs for Africa’s 200 million children, mainstreamed into national policy and local systems.
Since inception we have served over 6.5 million meals that have improved nutrition and education outcomes. Starting from 25 children in one school, we currently serve 33,000 children regionally and are the largest centrally run school feeding programme in East Africa.
Food for Education’s internal analysis of schools enrolled in the school feeding program, showed a 20% improvement in performance of the schools in the 2020 National Examination. Additionally, schools with the feeding program performed up to 30% higher than schools without feeding programs and school attendance across 28 schools improved by 45%. Food for Education continues to actively demonstrate that with innovative models that leverage technology and forming strong partnerships, we can achieve improved education outcomes and eliminate classroom hunger.
With this award, we hope our work will continue to show the importance of school feeding program as well as highlight how every child needs a meal to learn. Thank you.”
