60% of kids in Kenya can’t depend 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 individuals. 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 Government Director of Food4Education, understood from the beginning that expertise was key to scaling up her operation dramatically sufficient to fulfill the every day dietary wants of a whole bunch of 1000’s of younger learners. Her group created a deeply tech-based answer to assist remove starvation and be sure that school-going kids have entry to a wholesome meal.
Food4Education’s progressive Tap2Eat system—a wise fee answer—ensures that kids in Kenya obtain nutritious meals at college. 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 every day
In 2018, Cisco awarded the World 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 offered a expertise grant of Webex, Meraki, and Cisco Umbrella applied sciences. Our expertise permits 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 help 100,000 kids a day.
As we speak, over 500,000 kids can Tap2Eat lunch at college every day utilizing the Tap2Eat cell app and wristband. The wristband makes use of Close to-Area Communication (NFC) expertise to allow seamless transactions, making certain 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 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 every day meals—conserving this system regular, scalable, and sustainable.
The effectiveness of the answer is simple—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 dad and mom 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 via 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 affect
Cisco’s partnership with Food4Education, the progressive use of expertise, and a dynamic enterprise technique primarily based on community-centric options to longstanding challenges have helped this system develop and thrive.
Food4Education is a social affect 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. By means of our distinctive method, we scout for nice concepts and dynamic founders, after which help their early-stage, tech-enabled ideas via implementation, validation, and scaling.
For Cisco, funding nice concepts is simply the start. We carry the most effective 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 great 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 capability to speak and collaborate higher.”
See the story in movement
With Cisco’s help, Food4Education is altering a whole bunch of 1000’s of lives every single day—and counting—fostering the subsequent era of learners and making ready them to take part absolutely within the trendy economic system. To get the complete story, watch our newly launched documentary-style video.
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