How providing sustainable school meals also generates social and economic benefits thorughout the ecosystem.
As we observe World Food Day and governments across Africa wrestle with how to feed millions of children sustainably, two questions dominate: how do we fund school meals reliably, and how do we run them well at scale?
The challenge is not intent, since most governments (86%) already allocate funds; The challenge is building systems that translate budgets into affordable, accountable delivery every school day.
Enter Food4Education. We translate public intent into operating systems: design, operate, replicate. By blending public budgets, parent micro-contributions and private-sector efficiency, we deliver nutrition at scale.
Each school day in Kenya, more than 600,000 children eat a hot lunch through these partnerships, with 150m meals served to date. This is proof that built-for-scale operations can shift school feeding from aid-dependent projects to locally financed, economically embedded services.
At the center is innovation: Tap2Eat, our real-time data and digital payments platform. It enables parent contributions, public co-funding, and instant kitchen reconciliation. That accountability keeps unit costs near $0.30 per meal and enables repeatable scale. The visibility also sharpens demand forecasting, reduces leakage and waste, and aligns procurement and last-mile delivery to actual need.
On the production side, centralised high-throughput kitchens are built for industrial efficiency. Giga, Africa’s largest green kitchen, has a designed capacity of about 60,000 meals per day, using climate-smart methods such as recycled-biomass briquettes and steam-based cooking. These approaches cut fuel use and emissions while maintaining reliability and food-safety rigor.
These kitchens are not isolated factories, they are hubs of local economic activity. Daily operations link directly to local markets: more than 100 tons of food purchased from smallholder farmers each day, and over 4,500 jobs supported, about 80% percent held by women, and close to schools and families. A single meal represents a supply chain of opportunity, sustaining a web of livelihoods while improving attendance and learning.
This is social infrastructure in practice: one system generating multiple returns—better education outcomes, stronger local supply chains, women’s employment, and lower emissions —backed by the accountability that keeps costs predictable for the public purse.
The next phase is helping governments adopt the same blueprint across Africa. The playbook is consistent: plan kitchens and routes against real demand; digitise payments and operations; blend funding so public budgets are protected and performance is rewarded and standardise procurement so local producers can meet steady demand.
When governments provide stable budget lines and an enabling policy environment, development financiers and businesses can co-invest with confidence.
This World Food Day, the message is simple: investing in school meals is an economic strategy, not a welfare expense. Solving financing and operations together through digital accountability, blended funding, and climate-smart production, and school feeding becomes durable public infrastructure that feeds human capital and local economies, hand in hand.
