Progress Report
Thank you for your and Cisco's continued commitment to Food4Education and feeding children each and every day so they can stay in school and thrive.
You have generously served on our US Advisory Council since 2024, and we are truly grateful for your engagement thus far.
To date, your personal investment has funded 1 million meals. Put another way, you have been feeding 1,872 children a hot daily meal every single school day for the past three years. Every one of those children now has a chance to thrive, to make choices about their futures, because they're getting the education they deserve. No child should have to (or try to) learn on an empty stomach. And for close to 2,000 children, you have made that a reality.
Thank you.
We look forward to continuing the journey of feeding children in Kenya and beyond, and in the meantime, we wanted to provide you with a personal update on progress to date so you understand the true, direct impact of your investment in feeding the future.
While your visit to F4E did not come through the last time you were in Kenya, we do hope to meet Brian Tippens this summer and hope you will have another opportunity to see our work on the ground, perhaps at the same time as Chris Martin's visit. The future is so bright, Chuck!
In partnership,
Wawira and the F4E Team
Food4Education (F4E) is an award-winning, locally rooted, and locally led program to end classroom hunger. It is also a school-feeding economy: nutrition, agriculture, jobs, digital finance, and government partnerships all moving at once.
We've created 5,500+ jobs, mostly for women. We source 120 tons of food locally every day. For every $1 invested in school feeding done right, there are $20 in returns. Governments are no longer asking how many children F4E feeds. They are asking how many jobs, how many farmers, and how much of their budget is reinvested in their own communities.
F4E treats school feeding as public infrastructure, not charity. Parents contribute, government invests. The system creates livelihoods across the value chain. Dignity is the design principle: how kitchens are built, how parents are listened to, how a child taps a wristband and receives a meal without shame or stigma.
Today, we serve a meal based on rice and legumes, but the impact goes further: better nutrition, improved education outcomes, and increased opportunity for families and local workers.
Over the past decade, F4E has grown from feeding 25 children daily to serving over 635,000 children every school day in Kenya.
We've served more than 200 million meals in 1,900 schools in 15 counties.
Feed 1 million students daily in Kenya by 2027, and 2 million more children through expansion across Africa by 2030.
Over the past year, we have prioritized expansion across rural counties, strengthened government co-investment, and adapted our kitchen models to fit each community.
Since launching our partnership with the Nairobi County Government in 2023, we have served over 237,000 meals in Nairobi each day — a blueprint that is now driving county partnerships across Kenya.
We currently operate 32 central kitchens and 148 rural kitchens across 15 counties. In 2025 alone, we added 10 central kitchens, including new operations in Mombasa, Kakamega, Bungoma, Embu, and Nakuru — bringing hot daily meals to classrooms where hunger too often blocks learning.
We remain on track to feed 1 million students every day by 2027.
Over 70% of Kenya's population lives in rural areas, yet most school feeding models are built for urban density, leaving millions of rural children, often those facing the deepest food insecurity, without nutritious meals at school. Reaching them requires a fundamentally different approach: right-sized kitchens designed for ground realities, not sprawling central infrastructure.
We developed two kitchen formats for rural communities. Our 4,000 meal kitchens anchor high-density rural towns like Homa Bay and Siaya, while our 1,700 meal kitchens serve individual schools or tight clusters in lower-density areas, matching output to enrolment and eliminating waste. Both sit directly on school grounds and use motorcycles to reach nearby schools across difficult terrain.
This past year we tested that strategy across three new counties. In Embu, we launched a phased uji (porridge) program for pre-K students, our fourth county government partnership, recognizing fortified porridge as an affordable entry point while full meal infrastructure is built. In Homa Bay, our 4,000 meal kitchen came online, now serving 3,700 children across seven schools. In Nyandarua, a government funded uji program grounded in the policy we co-developed with the Council of Governors reached 3,000 daily cups by mid-2026.
We chose these counties deliberately: high food insecurity, large student populations, and governments ready to co-invest, making sustainability rather than donor dependency the foundation. Across 9 counties, 159 kitchens now serve 142,000+ meals daily, each program tailored to county needs. New rural kitchens are planned across seven more counties, proving that scale and rural reach can reinforce each other in Kenya's most underserved communities.
This past year, we rolled out HiBob, a human resource management platform that digitizes HR processes, enhances visibility into staffing data, and strengthens performance tracking across teams. We are also implementing LinkedIn Learning to build a consistent learning and development experience for all staff.
We reinforced performance and culture through structured leadership development with an external coach, and finalized a new competency framework now rolled out across all roles. To foster empathy and shared purpose, we launched a "role swap" initiative where office staff cook alongside frontline kitchen teams, an experience now embedded into every new hire's onboarding. Together, these investments reflect our belief that the strength of our operations depends on the strength of our people.
Technology remains the backbone of Food4Education's operations, anchored by Tap2Eat, our digital payments and data platform now supporting more than 635,000 registered users. Tap2Eat enables parents to contribute toward school meals while providing real-time visibility into meal access and delivery, strengthening transparency across the program.
What began as a practical solution to scaling school feeding has grown into a comprehensive data platform supporting real-time analytics, demand forecasting, supply chain coordination, and integrated reporting across kitchens, schools, and partners. Since Tap2Eat launched in 2019, F4E has grown nearly 60 times. To support our next phase, we are launching Tap2Eat Version 2, a smarter and more scalable platform with integrated mobile and web applications, secure backend infrastructure, real-time reporting, and a modular design that lets us deploy new features without disrupting operations.
We are also strengthening communication across schools, parents, and operational teams. Our Customer Experience team rolled out an omnichannel platform integrating SMS, WhatsApp, and interactive voice response, cutting communication costs by roughly KES 5 million (about $38,000) annually while improving responsiveness and service delivery.
As Food4Education scales nationally, we have begun sharing our model internationally. We signed an MoU with the Government of Zambia to strengthen its school feeding program and are in discussions with the city government of Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, to advise on a sustainable, locally led program of its own.
At home, we continue working with Kenya's Council of Governors to develop frameworks guiding the rollout of the National School Feeding Policy. This ensures school feeding becomes public infrastructure owned by governments and communities for the long term.
We are deeply grateful for our partnership with you, Mr. Robbins. When we first began working together, Food4Education served fewer than 20,000 children daily across a few counties. Today we reach more than 635,000 students every day across Kenya, supported by an expanding network of kitchens, digital systems, and partnerships.
Your generosity has helped strengthen the technology and operational systems that let us reach more children efficiently and transparently, and these systems will remain essential as we scale. Looking ahead, our goal is clear: one million children daily in Kenya by 2027, and supporting governments across Africa to replicate this model.
We would welcome the opportunity to keep building on this partnership, and we look forward to sharing the next chapter of this work with you.
Thank you for helping us feed the future!
