Kenyan school feeding innovator Food4Education (F4E) is among the organisations pressing the case that school meals can be an economic engine for the continent, as thousands of delegates gather in Kigali, Rwanda for the Africa Food Systems Forum (AFSF) 2026.
The five-day summit has brings together heads of government, private investors, farmers, researchers, development partners, women and youth to chart how Africa can build food systems that are healthier, more inclusive and resilient enough to meet the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
Among the key agenda items dominating discussions is school feeding, with governments and partners exploring how successful national models can be scaled across borders.
It is on this agenda that F4E is expected to present what organisers describe as a proven case with evidence that when governments work hand in hand with private and development partners, school feeding programmes can move from small pilots to systems serving hundreds of thousands of children, while simultaneously creating jobs and opening markets for smallholder farmers.
The Nairobi-based organisation’s numbers make the point. What began in 2012 as a programme feeding 25 children in founder Wawira Njiru’s hometown of Ruiru has grown into a system reaching more than 660,000 children daily across over 1,900 schools, with more than 200 million meals served to date. About 80 percent of the food F4E procures comes from local smallholder farmers, and the organisation now employs more than 6,000 people, most of them women and young people.
Much of that scale has been powered by technology built in Kenya. F4E’s Tap2Eat platform lets families contribute towards meal costs through NFC-enabled wristbands and cards, while feeding real-time data back into planning. At its Nairobi Giga Kitchen, which runs on solar and steam power, the organisation produces a nutritious meal for roughly 30 US cents, with food waste held below 1 percent.
These efficiency figures have caught the attention of governments beyond Kenya’s borders, including Zambia, which is now working with F4E to build its own nationally led feeding system in efforts to reach 5.6 million learners by December 2026.
F4E has set a target of reaching one million children daily in Kenya by 2027.
Wawira argues the conversation among African governments has shifted. Rather than asking only how many children a feeding programme can reach, she says policymakers are increasingly asking how many jobs the programme creates, how many farmers it connects to reliable markets, and how much public spending it channels back into local economies.
The aim is to reframe school feeding as infrastructure supporting economies across the continent rather than mere charity targeting vulnerable learners.
The Kigali appearance comes on the back of a run of international recognition for Wawira. Last month named recipient of the German Africa Prize 2026 by the Deutsche Afrika Stiftung (German Africa Foundation), for turning school feeding into what the organisation calls economic infrastructure. Claus Stäcker, President of the prize jury and Director of Programmes for Africa at Deutsche Welle, said Wawira’s model shows that school feeding can nourish children while strengthening local economic cycles.
Wawira has also been named the recipient of the Diane von Furstenberg(DVF) award winner to recognize her role in improving the lives of other women. The award recognized women who have demonstrated the courage to fight, the strength to survive and the leadership to inspire.
Over the years, The DVF Awards have honored extraordinary women from more than thirty countries working across a variety of issues, from tackling climate change and immigration, to fighting human trafficking, promoting gender equality and preventing violence against women.
“To be recognized by someone who opened the door so others could walk through it is an honor I carry with pride,” said Wawira on her social media pages after she was announced the awardee of the DVF award on August 31.
In her post Wawira revisited F4E’s origins, recalling that she started the organisation 14 years ago as “a 21-year-old international student trying to get 25 children in my hometown fed so they could stay in school,” with no connections, no trust fund and no benchmark to follow.
She said she struggled even to find men willing to work for her, so she “hired women” and “young people” instead — “thousands of them” — adding that the team was “underestimated every single day” and “built it anyway.”
Wawera also credited the farmers and families who backed F4E in its earliest days. “To every supplier and farmer who took a chance on us early, to every parent and teacher who trusted us before we had a name, and to every young woman who’s been told no and shows up anyway, this one’s for you,” she wrote on the LinkedIn page.
She added, “What people see for an instant is never the full story. And what comes next is always bigger than you can imagine.”
That reframing echoes the broader mood at AFSF 2026. Delegates on the opening day repeatedly returned to the idea that Africa’s difficulty is not a shortage of food but a shortage of investment and functioning systems, with one recurring line from sessions being that the continent already produces enough calories to meet its needs — the real barrier is getting food to move, trade efficiently and reach people equitably, within and across borders.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is also playing a central role at the Forum, contributing technical expertise across sessions on investment, climate action, gender equality and youth employment, and co-organising discussions aimed at turning national food systems plans into funded, actionable programmes.
For Kenya, F4E’s presence in Kigali offers a chance to position a homegrown model as continental proof of concept — evidence that a programme born on a torn sheet of paper in a Nairobi kitchen can inform how Africa feeds its children at scale.
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