Kenyan football is paying the price for childhood malnutrition, warns former Gor Mahia assistant coach

Eight organisations spanning youth media, heritage, culinary innovation, community mobilisation and food systems launched the Food Culture Alliance Kenya Strategic Plan 2026–2030; a five-year effort to change not what Kenyans can eat, but what they feel proud to eat.

Many of the foods that could improve Kenya’s nutrition - indigenous vegetables, millet, sorghum, legumes, omena, are Kenya’s own.

Yet in many urban homes they carry a stigma of poverty and the past, while processed and imported foods signal success.

One young Nairobi woman told the Alliance’s researchers: “I cook mukimo at home, but I’d never serve it when friends visit.” The cost is national: 18 per cent of Kenyan children under five are stunted (KDHS 2022).

Speaking at the launch, sports performance coach and former Gor Mahia assistant coach Mr. John Nyakundi said the pattern reaches all the way to elite sport.

“The common thinking around our football industry right now is foods like pasta as fuel for matchday. But maybe ugali ya wimbi with omena for fuel, or sweet potatoes with kuku ya kienyeji for recovery after a training session, would be the better choice - food that is right here, affordable and built for energy. We have performance answers in our own kitchens, and we walk right past them,” he said.

The deeper problem, he said, starts long before a player is even scouted: “Nutrition between 0 and 9 years is a key factor in determining an individual’s athletic ceiling. Without the right nutrition during those years, an individual will ultimately be limited in the full expression of their athletic potential, no matter how skilled they become.

This has been the reality for many talented children, especially in vulnerable communities: too few actual meals, or too little nutritional value in what they manage to eat. And our national football is paying the price for it.”

Why a footballer’s plate is a cultural question

The Food Culture Alliance argues that food culture cannot be changed from one platform, because it is shaped and reinforced across the institutions of everyday life: media and entertainment, where the meals characters eat on screen set what feels modern; schools, from what the curriculum teaches (o is for octopus not omena), to what the feeding programme serves, to what is sold at the school tuck shops; religion, where faith already shapes the plate - from Adventist health traditions to halal; fashion and beauty, where ideas of what to eat to stay slim and which foods to avoid steer daily choices; sport, where what athletes are seen fuelling on becomes aspirational; and family life, heritage sites and digital platforms, where a single post can make a dish desirable overnight.

Kenyans will meet the Alliance’s work in concrete places: heritage dishes reimagined for the home kitchen, the restaurant menu, the street and the snack kids will eat when the visit the Kenya Museums; street food vending zones being mapped with Nairobi County where traditional affordable and safe street food will be targeted; storylines and creator content showing heritage foods in modern Kenyan life; recipes documented with their source communities and reimaged for modern times released on a cost sharing basis with the original communities; and routes into school meals.

“For decades we assumed that if people knew which foods were good for them and could afford them, they would choose them. The numbers told us otherwise,” said Dennis Aberi, Deputy Country Director of GAIN, which convenes the Alliance. “Knowledge does not move a plate. Culture does.”

The strategy was developed by the Alliance’s eight members: Akili Network, Consumer Grassroots Association, the Food and Land Use Coalition, Food Innovation Studio, GAIN, the National Museums of Kenya, Shujaaz Inc and Slow Food Kenya. GAIN convenes and holds the secretariat.

Their shared vision: a Kenya where heritage foods are celebrated as living traditions and innovations, not relics.