The Impact of Affordable School Meals on Attendance

Hunger. It’s not just a horrible feeling… it also has a massive impact on how a child performs academically and how productive they will be as an adult.

A new Gates Foundation report “The Race to Nourish a Warming World” calls malnutrition the world’s worst health crisis - with more than 400 million children not getting the nutrients they need to grow and thrive.

Many of those children are in Africa - and one organisation trying to tackle child hunger is Food4Education. Since 2016 they have provided over 50 million meals in primary and secondary schools in Kenya. The cost to the parent in Nairobi is just 5 Kenyan shillings – that’s 3-4 US cents per plate.

So can other African countries learn lessons?

Today Alan speaks to Wawira Njiru the organisation's founder, as well as Stella Mose, a mother of two children who eat the meals, and who is also employed as manager for Tap2Eat - a payments system which enables kids to pay for their school meals electronically.