Food for Education (F4E)
Organization Details
Food4Education (F4E) is a Kenyan nonprofit that is creating a new blueprint for school feeding programs in Africa. In the last decade, F4E has provided over 73+ million school meals in Kenya, growing from feeding 25 children a day in 2012 to over 460,000 children a day in 2024. F4E’s scalable and replicable model uses climate-friendly cooking technology and farmto-table nutrition, with approximately 80% of ingredients sourced locally. This means that F4E invests in local economies, creating jobs and buyers for smallholder farmers and aggregators — especially women — and unlocking sustainability through co-investments from government and parents that covers about 70% of meal costs. F4E has scaled 30x since 2020 to provide the most affordable hot school meal in Kenya at just $0.30 per meal.
Impact Story
Our idea is to provide 1M children in Kenya with a daily hot nutritious meal through F4E’s school feeding program (SFP). We will also provide technical advisory support to at least two other African governments, so they can design and implement effective SFPs and reach another 2M children. At the same time, we will also disseminate knowledge globally through a Center of Excellence so that implementers across the globe can implement local, sustainable, cost-effective SFPs.
F4E is committed to monitoring, evaluating and improving our impact on children, local supply chains and government systems. We apply participatory methods to gather feedback from children, parents, community members and governments and we disaggregate our data to track how our program affects girls. F4E currently measures the impact of our SFPs on nutrition outcomes, school attendance and enrollment. During our Audacious project, we will strengthen our MEL systems through a third-party mixed-methods impact evaluation, which assesses F4E’s impact on children’s (ECD + primary) education and nutrition outcomes, as well as cost effectiveness of the intervention and economic development outcomes. We will build a learning agenda with other key actors to measure educational outcomes and conduct longitudinal studies around the long-term impact of school feeding on social and economic outcomes. In the future, we will also conduct impact evaluations on the contribution of school meals to children’s nutritional status; school feeding’s effects on learning, achievement and cognition; and the long-term benefits of school feeding.
Diverse Social Enterprise
The TRANSFORM Support Hub is committed to accelerating diverse owned and led enterprises to build more equitable and resilient supply chains.