A Skoll Award Winner Finds a Proximate Solution for School-Based Nutrition in Africa

Wawira Njiru, 2024 Skoll Awards Ceremony. Photo courtesy of Skoll Foundation.

Earlier this month, a community of some 1,500 from around the world gathered at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford to help find solutions to issues ranging from climate change to intergenerational trauma.

Hosted by the foundation created by Jeff Skoll, headliners this year included former Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern, George and Amal Clooney, and Mary Robinson, chair of The Elders. But the main focus is connecting and elevating the social innovators working on the ground to bring about lasting change. A handful of organizations and their leaders are recognized each year with the Skoll Award for Social Innovation for applying new and transformational ideas to solving some of the world’s most urgent and complex problems.

Wawira Njiru, one of this year’s four winners, models Skoll’s trust in an entrepreneurial mindset, and confidence in putting real world problems in the hands of local visionaries. In just eight years, Food for Education, the organization Njiru founded in the belief that hungry kids aren’t learning, has become a blueprint for providing school-based nutrition at a systems-change level, with a decidedly proximate approach.

Entrepreneurial solutions

Candidates for the Skoll Awards for Social Innovation are drawn from social entrepreneurs and other innovators working in and across its five priority systems: pandemics and strengthening health systems, sound governance, inclusive economies, racial justice and climate action.

The foundation is not alone in finding sustainable solutions in the work of social entrepreneurs and innovators. Other prominent funders of this work include Ashoka, Gucci and the Gates Foundation.

Criteria for taking home a Skoll Award include the potential to disrupt unequal power dynamics and systemic policies and practices, modeling the governance and leadership capacity to scale operations, and leading proven solutions that are both close to the challenge and nearing an inflection point. The difference Skoll community networks can make in raising awareness and resources also carries weight.

Winners receive $2 million in unrestricted funding over three years to scale their impact, as well as long-term membership in the Skoll global community that shares their aims. Since 2005, Skoll has backed more than 400 organizations on five continents. The awards sit alongside other foundation programs, such as the Skoll Fellows and the Skoll Global Threats Fund.

Three of the organizations tapped this year for the Skoll Awards were the SaveLIFE Foundation, which works to improve road safety and trauma care in India; Meedan, a tech NPO that creates software and programs to boost digital literacy and journalism; and IllumiNative, an Native women-led organization that uses the power of storytelling to advance goals of social justice, equity and self-determination.

The fourth, Food for Education, is led by social innovator Wawira Njiru.

Unconditional dignity

At 21, Njiru saw a problem that has long challenged Africa and the Global South — childhood hunger — and decided to do something about it.

She grew up in Kenya, to parents who changed their own lot in life through the power of education. Njiru remembers wanting to share the lunches they provided, while her playmates went hungry. The experience made her view feeding children not as a problem of rice and beans, but of “unconditional dignity.”

She married the two ideas of hunger and education by zeroing in on feeding children in educational settings, and the idea of eradicating childhood hunger in Africa “one school meal at a time.”

Njiru began fundraising while still a student nutritionist in Australia, and took an incremental approach to growth. Her first effort raised $150,000 toward the modest goal of feeding 25 Kenyan children. Her next goal was 100 meals, then 10,000. Today, the scalable mix of centralized and local operations she created have expanded to five Kenyan counties.

Food for Education works with the Kenyan government to boost sustainability, and to help scale policy across the country. Operations supplant a nutritional structure that Njiru said was largely implemented by international actors and humanitarian welfare programs.

Proximate empowerment

Building out Food for Education has been a study in proximate philanthropy.

It currently operates a mix of 18 centralized, 53 semi-centralized and 15 decentralized kitchens, including eight recently opened in Nairobi, each of which serves multiple schools. Njiru said a mix of kitchens work best for serving both urban and rural geographies and achieving cost efficiencies. The all-inclusive cost per meal currently runs just under 30 cents.

Inside the humming kitchens is a story of local economic empowerment. Njiru said that the organization has created upwards of 3,000 jobs since it started. Seventy-four percent of the workers are women. Many are parents in their first professional jobs. Payment technology allows kids to use wristbands to access meals, and parents to easily load mobile money for payment.

At the same time, Food for Education has been building smart supply chains and simplifying distribution. Njiru said all the food is sourced locally from smallholder farmers through simplified distribution, with the exception of rice — which comes from Pakistan.

An inflection point

Funding from Skoll comes at an important inflection point. Since the first central kitchen opened in 2016, the organization has gone from providing 25 to 300,000 meals a day. The goal post has shifted to 400,000 daily meals, up from 170,000 the previous year — toward the ultimate goal of reaching a million kids. Njiru said she sees the Skoll support as an opportunity build impact and growth, and is considering expansion to new countries.

Besides Skoll, Food for Education’s work has drawn backing from funders like MasterCard Foundation, the McCall Family Foundation, Co-Impact and the ELMA Foundation — a list Njiru hopes will continue to grow.

Proof that Njiru will benefit from Skoll’s community networks came before the forum even drew to a close. At a delegate-led discussion of African entrepreneurs on scaling sustainable food solutions, one asked why Njiru has to buy her rice from Pakistan. Why couldn’t it be grown in Africa, and feed Africa’s children? Another discussed the issues involved in growing a quality product at home, in terms of climate and soil. Another discussed the hurdles of trade barriers between African countries. Surely, they agreed, they could work together on this. The system could change.