60% of youngsters in Kenya can’t rely on three meals a day. For kids in underserved communities throughout Africa, training stays the surest path to a safer future — and but starvation inhibits studying and optimum growth for a majority of the nation’s younger folks. It’s a lot tougher to study on an empty abdomen.
Learn the way Food4Education scaled as much as serving half one million college meals a day with Cisco’s assist.
Wawira Njiru, Founder and Govt Director of Food4Education, understood from the beginning that expertise was key to scaling up her operation dramatically sufficient to satisfy the each day dietary wants of lots of of hundreds of younger learners. Her group created a deeply tech-based answer to assist eradicate starvation and be certain that school-going kids have entry to a wholesome meal.
Food4Education’s revolutionary Tap2Eat system—a sensible fee answer—ensures that kids in Kenya obtain nutritious meals in school. By utilizing a wearable wristband linked to a cell pockets, kids can simply scan, eat, and concentrate on 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 take a look at this expertise. 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 creating their Tap2Eat app and platform.
In 2022, we supplied a expertise grant of Webex, Meraki, and Cisco Umbrella applied sciences. Our expertise permits 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 supplied a money grant to allow additional growth and scaling of their program to assist 100,000 kids a day.
As we speak, over 500,000 kids can Tap2Eat lunch in school each day utilizing the Tap2Eat cell app and wristband. The wristband makes use of Close to-Area Communication (NFC) expertise to allow seamless transactions, guaranteeing college students obtain meals with out the necessity for money or bodily contact.
Subtle analytics and expertise to optimize outcomes
The system additionally verifies meal supply to kids and sends real-time information on to Food4Education’s operational dashboards. This technique ensures correct monitoring of meal portions and uptake, enabling predictive analytics and simpler meal planning for the longer term.
Dad and mom, 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 simple—and the youngsters 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 mentioned, “however it additionally offers kids a way of possession and a way of pleasure.”
In colleges that serve meals by means of Tap2Eat, truancy is nearly zero. Tutorial efficiency is bettering, and attendance has elevated by as much as 30% in lots of areas.
Collaborating to realize exponential impression
Cisco’s partnership with Food4Education, the revolutionary use of expertise, and a dynamic enterprise technique based mostly on community-centric options to longstanding challenges have helped this system develop and thrive.
Food4Education is a social impression associate that embodies our shared values round primary vitamin and high quality training for everybody, whereas additionally demonstrating the facility of our incubator mannequin for nonprofits. Via our distinctive strategy, we scout for excellent concepts and dynamic founders, after which assist their early-stage, tech-enabled ideas by means of implementation, validation, and scaling.
For Cisco, funding nice concepts is barely the start. We convey the very best of Cisco—our expertise, our experience, and our innovation—to the connection. Setting our non-profit companions up for long run success and sustainability is all the time our aim. And it’s a aim shared with Wawira and Food4Education—as she places it: “I may write a guide about our fantastic relationship with Cisco!”
She explains, “Cisco has given us follow-on funding to enhance our use of expertise throughout the group, from utilizing Meraki throughout our operation, discovering methods to attach all our gadgets which can be utilized in Tap2Eat throughout an enormous community of faculties, to serving to us by way of our conferencing and our skill to speak and collaborate higher.”
See the story in movement
With Cisco’s assist, Food4Education is altering lots of of hundreds of lives on daily basis—and counting—fostering the subsequent technology of learners and getting ready them to take part totally within the fashionable economic system. To get the total story, watch our newly launched documentary-style video.
Share: