Africa’s Largest Kitchen by Food4Education

One of the Top 20 Most Influential Projects of 2024

Africa’s Largest Kitchen by Food4Education

One of the Top 20 Most Influential Projects of 2024

For bringing fresh, locally grown food to 25 percent of Nairobi’s population

Region: Sub-Saharan Africa  Sector: Agriculture  UN SDGs: 2, Zero Hunger

Food access and security is a significant problem throughout the African continent, and in Kenya alone, more than 5.4 million people are currently experiencing food insecurity classified at emergency or crisis levels. The European Commission indicates that this is the “highest magnitude and severity of acute food insecurity” that the country has experienced in years. Numerous aid organizations have a presence in the country working to combat hunger, but the need is so great that more support is needed. In particular, Kenya needs support that is driven by local stakeholders who understand the country’s geographic and cultural contexts. And they need projects and programs that tackle food security from a structural perspective, seeking not just to feed people but to improve the overall food ecosystem.

Food4Education is one such local stakeholder organization, a nonprofit whose work is so effective and respected that its founder and CEO, nutritionist Wawira Njiru, was named a Ford Foundation fellow, and the organization itself was ranked as one of TIME’s 2024 100 Most Influential Companies list. Njiru, who started the organization more than a decade ago by feeding 25 schoolchildren, has scaled exponentially since then. Food4Education runs 18 kitchens across Kenya, working in collaboration with the federal government and with municipal officials. Njiru’s ultimate goal is a big one: to feed one million Kenyan kids each day by 2027, and three million daily by 2030.

In 2023, Food4Education implemented a project that helped them take one big step closer to reaching that goal: Africa’s Largest Kitchen. The project set out to improve food access by making sure children in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi receive nutritious meals during the school day, and it achieves that objective daily by serving 60,000 meals, expanding its served food volume by a factor of four, from 58 tons of food per day, to 195 tons of food per day. All told, Africa’s Largest Kitchen is now serving 25 percent of the Nairobi population every day.  

 

Five young boys standing in a line, holding their plates out in front of them

 

These data points would be impressive on their own, but the way in which the project was implemented and is carried out on a daily basis within the larger food and economic ecosystem of Nairobi is even more substantive. Njiru and her team look at the bigger picture: How can they support local farmers and improve local agriculture and the local economy? By purchasing their food from them rather than importing it. How can they stimulate Nairobi’s economic engine, bringing dignified, living wage work to the city’s most vulnerable, underemployed or unemployed class? By hiring locals, more than half of whom are parents, to work in the kitchen.

The success of the Largest Kitchen project has convinced Njiru that her countrywide goals for Food4Education are well within reach. “We’re creating the blueprint for scalable, replicable, and cost-efficient school feeding across Africa,” she told TIME in an interview. Njiru notes that improving food access to children by providing nutritious meals in the school setting has a ripple effect. Nutrition improves health and well-being, of course, but it also improves academic performance, and sustained academic performance improves one’s longer-term learning, working, and earning opportunities. Hunger, the organization notes in its 2023 impact report, is the largest solvable problem facing African children. “I believe nutrition is a critical lever for change” Njiru said to the Ford Foundation. The work she’s doing through Africa’s Largest Kitchen project proves it.