60% of kids in Kenya can’t depend on three meals a day. For kids in underserved communities throughout Africa, schooling 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 1,000,000 faculty 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 fulfill the each day dietary wants of tons of of 1000’s of younger learners. Her group created a deeply tech-based resolution to assist eradicate starvation and be certain 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 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 growing their Tap2Eat app and platform.
In 2022, we offered a expertise grant of Webex, Meraki, and Cisco Umbrella applied sciences. Our expertise allows Food4Education to gather and use knowledge 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 growth and scaling of their program to assist 100,000 kids a day.
At the moment, 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) expertise to allow seamless transactions, guaranteeing college students obtain meals with out the necessity for money or bodily contact.
Refined analytics and expertise to optimize outcomes
The system additionally verifies meal supply to kids and sends real-time knowledge 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 mentioned, “but it surely additionally offers kids a way of possession and a way of pleasure.”
In colleges that serve meals by means of Tap2Eat, truancy is sort of zero. Tutorial efficiency is enhancing, and attendance has elevated by as much as 30% in lots of areas.
Collaborating to realize exponential impression
Cisco’s partnership with Food4Education, the modern 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 schooling for everybody, whereas additionally demonstrating the facility of our incubator mannequin for nonprofits. By our distinctive method, we scout for nice 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 just the start. We convey one of the 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 objective. And it’s a objective shared with Wawira and Food4Education—as she places it: “I may write a ebook 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 units which might 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 tons of of 1000’s of lives day-after-day—and counting—fostering the following era of learners and making ready them to take part absolutely within the fashionable financial system. To get the total story, watch our newly launched documentary-style video.
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