Wawira Njiru has never had to look very far to see the devastating effects of chronic hunger.
Growing up in Kenya, Njiru witnessed firsthand how malnourishment affected the lives of some of her classmates, particularly when it came to education.
Later in life, while studying at university in Australia, Njiru came to realize how much of a role a balanced, nutritious diet had played in her own learning and growth.
“One of the key differences between my life and theirs was I could access three meals a day,” she says. That basic connection — that a proper education starts with a proper meal — inspired Njiru to launch Food4Education, a Nairobi-based organization that now feeds nearly half a million Kenyan children every day.
And while Food4Education is very much an African solution to a hunger crisis that has only worsened in the face of climate change and conflict, the organization has also drawn inspiration from Japan’s school lunch programs, highlighting how the country’s recovery from the devastation of World War II can serve as a model for developing countries striving to follow a similar path.
Worsening hunger
Due to factors ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to the war in Ukraine and the crisis in the Middle East, the 2020s have been marked by a setback in the global fight against hunger.
A report by five United Nations agencies released last July showed that 1 in 11 people worldwide faced hunger in 2023, including 1 in 5 in Africa.
The global figure is equivalent to about 733 million people, or roughly 152 million more than in 2019.
Developing countries are also receiving less aid from wealthier nations, with the U.N.’s World Food Programme slashing the number of people it feeds due to insufficient support from top economies. Last year, the U.N. raised just 46% of the $49.6 billion it had sought for humanitarian aid.
Add in the need to adapt food production for a warmer world, and the task of feeding a global population that’s expected to exceed 10 billion by the end of this century becomes all the more challenging.
Despite all that, production of many staple crops actually went up in 2024, with global rice and soybean crops reaching record levels, highlighting the fact that, while the world may have enough food, it’s simply not being distributed to the planet’s poorest and hungriest.
Enter grassroots solutions like Food4Education, which Njiru founded in 2012 at the age of 21.
When it started, Food4Education fed 25 children a day out of a single kitchen using a model that it still employs today.
“(Before we started), I was researching about school feeding programs across the world, and there was a lot of inspiration from countries like India and Japan,” she says.
Her research eventually led to the adoption of an Indian-style centralized kitchen model, where food is made at scale in a network of kitchens and distributed to students.
The organization designs the menu, prepares the food using 80% local ingredients and delivers it to classrooms across Kenya.
Funding comes from three sources: the government, donors and the parents, with payment amounts varying by location and ability.
By 2024, the organization was feeding 450,000 a day, including 60,000 from a single “gigakitchen” that its website says is Africa’s largest.
Njiru and her team aren’t stopping there, however, and have a goal to feed 1 million children per day by 2027 while also spreading their operations beyond Kenya’s borders to other parts of Africa. By 2030, they hope to feed 2 million more children in two other African nations. In Njiru’s mind, improving the hunger situation in Africa isn’t only a benefit for the continent, but also the wider world.
“We have the youngest population in the world,” says Njiru. “They need to be educated, they need to be nourished so that they can participate in a global economy.”
Climate concerns
Rising temperatures are having myriad effects on global food security, and as is the case with many of the worst consequences of climate change, it’s the developing world that is bearing the brunt of the impact.
Natural disasters made more severe by warming are rattling food supply chains by damaging vital transportation infrastructure, while climate change-induced heat waves, drought and flooding are harming food production.
Njiru has seen the effect of climate change firsthand, and notes that diets in Kenya are becoming less balanced as certain vegetables become too expensive or unavailable.
A farmer uproots a field where he was growing maize that failed because of a drought, in Kilifi county, Kenya, in February 2022.
| Reuters
“The food basket at home has become less nutritious because of climate change because parents are not able to access the vegetables they once were. They’re more expensive. They’re not accessing protein, which is a big part of what children need to develop,” says Njiru, who last year was given the Elevate Prize, which honors leaders who are driving transformative change.
Given the impact hunger has on education, Njiru believes that solving that crisis and climate change go hand in hand.
Because Africa’s emissions pale in comparison to top emitters like the U.S. and China, decarbonizing African economies can only go so far in curbing warming. Instead, Njiru argues, Africa’s biggest impact can be in building climate resilience and developing solutions, but that potential can only be reached if young people can focus on their education and not have to worry about where their next meal will come from.
“It’s such an important connection, I think, and it also fundamentally lies in that climate change solutions are not a broad stroke across the world,” she says. “They are different in different contexts. And for Africa specifically, there’s a lot of social issues that mean that people are vulnerable to climate change.”
Model for change
It’s not unusual for tourists to Japan to feel inspired by the country’s world-class food scene, but for Njiru, the source of her excitement during a recent trip to Osaka was something visitors don’t usually get to see: school lunches.
“One of the things that was really compelling for me … was actually how Japan integrates nutritional education and how they serve meals. And you know, children have an awareness of where the food is coming from, what the nutrient composition is and what it does to their bodies. And so children grow up with a sense of, ‘this is good for me,’” she says.
Indeed, Japan’s school lunch program goes beyond the fundamental necessity of nourishment. The School Lunch Law outlines a series of goals for the program, including fostering good eating habits in children, ensuring students appreciate where food comes from and respect the hard work of people in the food and service industry.
While school lunch programs for the needy go back to the 19th century, the modern iteration of near-universal school feeding was born in the wake of World War II, when Japan faced a long road toward reconstruction and malnourishment among children was common.
Lunch time at a school in Takamatsu, Kagawa Prefecture. Lunches are provided at 99.2% of elementary schools across the country.
| Jiji
The government nearly scrapped school feeding altogether in the 1950s due to budget constraints, but parent-teacher associations from around the country rallied in opposition. These days, lunches are provided at 99.2% of elementary schools and 87.9% of junior high schools nationwide and there’s also a strong emphasis on limiting waste — an Environment Ministry survey on food loss found that just 6.9% of school lunch food is wasted.
When asked what a country like Japan could be doing to improve the situation on the ground in Africa, Njiru noted that the school lunch program could serve as a model for nations that are aiming to turn a corner and rebuild, much as Japan did after World War II.
“Seeing how school feeding programs have been sustained within Japanese culture and by the Japanese government, it’s one of the things I think Japan can share with African countries,” she says. “Japan invested in this really early, and is reaping benefits from that years and years later. I think what Japan can also do is invest in school feeding programs across the world, because it’s something that Japan itself has experience of seeing the impact and what it does.”
During her trip to Osaka last month, Njiru attended the Global Child Nutrition Forum, which brought together leaders of school meal programs from around the world for a series of workshops and exchanges.
One of the messages she brought to that venue was that African solutions for the continent’s chronic hunger issue do exist, as evidenced by the success of Food4Education.
Still, that doesn’t mean that the support of rich nations like Japan isn’t needed, and beyond humanitarian motivations, it’s clear that investments in developing nations can pay major dividends for rich nations with declining populations.
“African young people are not just going to stay in Africa,” Njiru notes. “They’re going to be the workforce of Europe. They’re going to be the workforce of Japan. They’re going to be the workforce of the world.”