Founded in 2012, Food4Education provides nutritious, subsidized lunch meals to over ten thousand children who attend public primary schools in Kenya. Meals are funded by a variety of donors, and parents use the organization’s technology platform Tap2Eat to pay around $0.15 per meal. A virtual wallet is linked to an NFC wristband, which students use to make their payment. “We are continually improving on our already existing and working systems to allow us to lower the cost per meal,” says Wawira Njiru, founder and executive director of Food4Education.

Wawira says that the organization has improved the lives of thousands of vulnerable children. It started out feeding twenty-five children each day and now feeds ten thousand daily. Food4Education aims to make this one hundred thousand kids every day by the end of 2020 and to grow further from there. “We’ve used technology, smart operations and logistics to provide over one million meals, with a goal of reaching one million kids a day by 2025,” says Wawira. “Our vision is that no Kenyan child will have to learn while hungry, and we are working hard to ensure that as many kids as possible have access to nutritious meals every day.”

Food4Education works with a network of partners including the Mulago Foundation, the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation and Cisco. Parents’ contributions currently account for over 60 percent of the cost of each meal, but as the organization expands, it plans to use economies of scale to lower the overall cost per meal.