60% of kids in Kenya can’t depend on three meals a day. For youngsters in underserved communities throughout Africa, schooling stays the surest path to a safer future — and but starvation inhibits studying and optimum improvement for a majority of the nation’s younger folks. It’s a lot tougher to be taught on an empty abdomen.
Find out how Food4Education scaled as much as serving half one million faculty meals a day with Cisco’s assist.
Wawira Njiru, Founder and Govt Director of Food4Education, understood from the beginning that know-how was key to scaling up her operation dramatically sufficient to fulfill the each day dietary wants of a whole lot of hundreds of younger learners. Her group created a deeply tech-based resolution to assist remove starvation and be sure that school-going kids have entry to a wholesome meal.
Food4Education’s modern Tap2Eat system—a sensible cost resolution—ensures that kids in Kenya obtain nutritious meals in school. By utilizing a wearable wristband linked to a cellular pockets, kids can simply scan, eat, and give attention to studying with out worrying about starvation.
Scaling up from 3,000 to over 500,000 meals served each day
In 2018, Cisco awarded the International Citizen Prize for Youth Management to Wawira to create and check this know-how. On the time, the group was feeding 3,000 kids a day in Kenya. The funding enabled her group to scale from feeding 3,000 kids a day to 10,000 kids a day whereas additionally growing their Tap2Eat app and platform.
In 2022, we offered a know-how grant of Webex, Meraki, and Cisco Umbrella applied sciences. Our know-how allows Food4Education to gather and use information analytics to boost their operations and choices, mitigate cyber threats, and securely join their operations, platform, and program choices. We additionally offered a money grant to allow additional improvement and scaling of their program to help 100,000 kids a day.
In the present day, over 500,000 kids can Tap2Eat lunch in school each day utilizing the Tap2Eat cellular app and wristband. The wristband makes use of Close to-Discipline Communication (NFC) know-how to allow seamless transactions, guaranteeing college students obtain meals with out the necessity for money or bodily contact.
Refined analytics and know-how to optimize outcomes
The system additionally verifies meal supply to kids and sends real-time information on to Food4Education’s operational dashboards. This method ensures correct monitoring of meal portions and uptake, enabling predictive analytics and simpler meal planning for the long run.
Mother and father, philanthropy, and authorities all contribute to the price of each day meals—maintaining this system regular, scalable, and sustainable.
The effectiveness of the answer is plain—and the kids are getting nourished in additional methods than one. As Wawira places it, “Each lunchtime, they’ll simply go faucet, so it offers mother and father a really excessive stage of visibility,” she stated, “but it surely additionally offers kids a way of possession and a way of pleasure.”
In faculties that serve meals by Tap2Eat, truancy is nearly zero. Tutorial efficiency is bettering, and attendance has elevated by as much as 30% in lots of areas.
Collaborating to attain exponential impression
Cisco’s partnership with Food4Education, the modern use of know-how, and a dynamic enterprise technique primarily based on community-centric options to longstanding challenges have helped this system develop and thrive.
Food4Education is a social impression companion that embodies our shared values round fundamental diet and high quality schooling for everybody, whereas additionally demonstrating the facility of our incubator mannequin for nonprofits. By means of our distinctive method, we scout for nice concepts and dynamic founders, after which help their early-stage, tech-enabled ideas by implementation, validation, and scaling.
For Cisco, funding nice concepts is just the start. We convey the perfect of Cisco—our know-how, our experience, and our innovation—to the connection. Setting our non-profit companions up for long run success and sustainability is at all times our aim. And it’s a aim shared with Wawira and Food4Education—as she places it: “I may write a ebook about our great relationship with Cisco!”
She explains, “Cisco has given us follow-on funding to enhance our use of know-how throughout the group, from utilizing Meraki throughout our operation, discovering methods to attach all our units which are utilized in Tap2Eat throughout an enormous community of faculties, to serving to us when it comes to our conferencing and our means to speak and collaborate higher.”
See the story in movement
With Cisco’s help, Food4Education is altering a whole lot of hundreds of lives every single day—and counting—fostering the following era of learners and getting ready them to take part totally within the trendy economic system. To get the total story, watch our newly launched documentary-style video.
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