Food4Education calls for enhanced budgets to sustain school feeding initiatives

 

School children being served a hot meal during lunch break. [File, Standard]

Food4Education is now calling on the government to come up with policies that will end classroom hunger across the country.

In celebration of the 2025 Day of the African Child, the Kenyan-based NGO said the government and its partners must deliberately push the school feeding programmes to the top of their budgets and agendas.

Founder and Chief Executive Officer Wawira Njiru said the government must make bold steps in ensuring that no child learns hungry with an aim of making school feeding a right and not a privilege.

“The stakes are higher than ever; we cannot afford to see child malnutrition and socioeconomic growth as separate issues. We know well-nourished children perform better in class, but when school feeding is locally rooted, we also create jobs, support smallholder farmers, and strengthen local economies,” said Ms Njiru, adding, “If we want to build a prosperous country for our children, this is where we start.”

Ms Njiru argued that Kenya Kwanza’s government must embed sustainable finance and enabling policy that supports public investment and daily operations.

This national government policy, she said, should include school feeding programs as a human capital investment as well as a health, nutrition and education priority.

While maintaining that adequate funding is critical to insulate programs from global donor volatility, Ms Njiru said the local economies across the African region should be built with ecosystem partners who understand local infrastructure and can deliver at scale.

“The government must embrace people-centred innovation that leverages accessible and widely adoptable technology to optimise, reduce cost, and collect data for informed growth,” she said.

 Njiru further said that the government must trust and empower local ecosystem providers.

“Government’s commitment is critical for scale and sustainability, but independent public and private sectors can bring much-needed speed and adaptability to pilot new solutions,” she said.

She said about 90 million African children are enrolled in school, but 50 million of them show up on an empty stomach each day.

She said 13 years ago, Food4Education began in a makeshift kitchen serving 25 children and today delivers over 500,000 hot, nutritious meals in various day schools across the country in partnership with local governments, smallholder farmers, and community stakeholders.

“By sourcing ingredients from over 100 tons of locally grown food, 80 per cent of it from smallholder farmers, Food4Education is also building supply chains that reinvest in rural economies.

According to Ms Njiru,  80 per cent of African governments have 2 budgets allocated for school feeding, yet across the continent, many operational challenges prevent implementation.

This intention-action gap is what inspired F4E’s Pan-African blueprint to mainstream school feeding programs across the continent so that no child ever has to learn on an empty stomach.