FILE PHOTO: School children receive food via school nutrition programme.The day is set aside to emphasise the need for school feeding schemes as a way to increase enrollments and improve retention and performanceA young Kenyan nutritionist Wawira Njiru started the ‘Food for Education’ feeding programme which provides highly subsidized and nutritious lunches to schools in Kenya.
From a central kitchen that operates 24 hours, food is packed into specialised vehicles which snake their way through the villages and all the way to Nairobi and distribute the food across several schools to ensure that at exactly the same time, thousands of children will have a meal to eat. Statistics from the World Food Program indicates that just over 60 million children live in extreme poverty and they have no access to school feeding programmes, so this meal that Food for Education provides makes all the difference.
“Food attracts children to school and it also keeps them in school. So, children are able to learn, they are able to listen to what the teacher is saying. You can imagine trying to listen to a teacher when you are hungry, you are not going to listen to them,” Njiru elaborates.“I can say that minus food no education. Children entirely depend on food to make them energetic to undertake these lessons. This program has really assisted us in terms of retaining children in school,” says Saruni.
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