About 90 percent of children in Africa don’t get enough to eat. Children suffering from malnutrition are far less likely to keep going to school. Without an education, millions of children are held in a cycle of poverty. Despite decades of evidence that school feeding programs are an effective solution to childhood hunger, locally led school feeding programs are a rarity in Africa.
IN 2012 Wawira Njuru started her first kitchen feeding 25 children. By 2016 with the first central kitchen, the organisation was feeding 10,000 . Now they feed 500,000 across Kenya with the ambition to reach 1 million – but more importantly provide the government with a scaleable model that can be rolled out across all low income countries. It has also created 4000 sustainable, quality jobs.
A trained nutritionist, social entrepreneur, and the Founder and Executive Director of Food for Education Wawira is a talented leader who is passionate about solving problems in her community while building local economies and creating jobs. She leads F4E’s overall strategy of co-designing locally led partnerships with smallholder farmers, parents, logistics suppliers, and government to deliver efficient, nutritious, and affordable school feeding programs at scale.
Wawira has received numerous prestigious awards for her work. She was the first recipient of the 2018 Global Citizen Youth Leadership Prize presented by Cisco, the 2021 United Nations Person of the Year and the recipient of the World’s 50 Best 2022 Icon Award. She is a 2021 Young Global Leader with the World Economic Forum, a 2020 Ford Foundation Global Fellow, a 2018 Rainer Arnhold Fellow, and in 2024 a Skoll awardee.
