Food4Education partners with Zambian gov’t to feed 5.6 million children

Kenyan not-for-profit social enterprise Food4Education has signed a four-year partnership with the Government of Zambia to strengthen the country's national school feeding programme and support plans to increase the number of beneficiaries from 4.6 million to 5.6 million children by the end of 2026.

The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), signed with Zambia's Ministry of Education in Lusaka, establishes a long-term technical cooperation framework aimed at strengthening the country's government-led school feeding system.

Under the agreement, Food4Education will support the ministry in policy and institutional coordination, programme design and operational systems, data and digitalisation, budgeting and financing, as well as infrastructure and equipment.

The partnership seeks to strengthen learning outcomes, improve nutrition, support local agriculture and create long-term economic opportunities.

"Universal school feeding is an investment in our children's futures and our nation's economic growth. This partnership with Food4Education helps us strengthen the systems that turn this investment into long-term returns for Zambia," said Dr Kelvin Mambwe, Permanent Secretary for Education Services in Zambia.

According to the partners, Africa loses up to 16.5 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product annually due to childhood hunger, while school feeding programmes can generate up to 20 dollars in returns for every dollar invested.

Food4Education Founder and CEO Wawira Njiru said Zambia's approach demonstrates how governments can leverage school feeding to stimulate economic growth beyond improving access to education.

"Zambia is doing something that the continent needs to see. It is putting its own treasury and the weight of several ministries behind its own children, building school feeding as economic infrastructure that strengthens agriculture, creates dignified livelihoods, builds human capital, and grows the economy," said Njiru.

"Food4Education is here to support what Zambia's leadership has already started, and to help accelerate the school feeding economy across Africa."

The organisation said government-led school feeding programmes create benefits beyond classrooms by connecting smallholder farmers to reliable markets, creating jobs across the food value chain, particularly for women and youth, strengthening local food systems and supporting digital public infrastructure.

Food4Education said its role in Zambia will be purely technical, helping the government strengthen delivery systems needed to sustain universal school feeding at scale, while implementation will remain under the government's leadership.

The partnership builds on Zambia's Free Education Policy introduced in 2022, which brought an additional two million learners into the education system and increased demand for school feeding services.

Founded in Kenya in 2012, Food4Education has served more than 200 million meals through government-aligned school feeding programmes. The organisation says it sources 80 per cent of its food locally from thousands of smallholder farmers and operates its proprietary Tap2Eat digital platform, which processes millions of school feeding transactions annually.

The agreement also comes ahead of Zambia's hosting of the Global Child Nutrition Forum in November 2026, which will bring together governments, development partners and school feeding practitioners from across Africa and beyond.

If intended for the Citizen Digital Business or Africa section, this version is appropriately concise while retaining the key statistics, quotes and regional significance of the partnership.