TED Talks Daily
The blueprint for serving a million school lunches — every day | Wawira Njiru
30 Jul 2025
With a genius combination of smart tech, local food and bold partnerships, Wawira Njiru and her nonprofit Food4Education have gone from serving 25 children in a makeshift kitchen to becoming a cornerstone of Kenya’s school meals system, delivering half a million meals every day. Hear her plan to feed a million kids daily in Kenya by 2030 — and two million more across Africa — as she offers a blueprint for the rest of the world to follow. (This ambitious idea is part of The Audacious Project, TED's initiative to inspire and fund global change.)For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Feeding 1 million kids daily in Kenya by 2030 and 2 million more across Africa? Now that is great math. In this talk, food trailblazer Warira Najiru shares how her organization, Food for Education, is changing the script on what is possible.
There are innovative solutions taking place across Africa, which can serve as a blueprint for feeding children sustainably and at scale. It's time, she asks us, to reimagine the continent not as a crisis zone, but as the source of inspiration for what is possible. And it's time we listen.
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What do you see when you picture world hunger? A skinny, starving kid in Africa, an aid worker swooping in to save the day, a grain sack stumped with a flag of a distant nation. Now, picture something else. A farmer harvesting fresh crops, securing the knowledge that they will feed local schoolchildren instead of disappearing at a throwaway price to a volatile market.
Bustling kitchens across Kenya serving thousands of meals daily, powered by clean energy and run by local women. a mother contributing to her child's lunch with a tap of a wristband. Now, the world has long treated hunger as a crisis that Africa suffers and the West solves. But what if Africa had the blueprints to feeding the future? I was raised in a home where generosity was a way of life.
My parents were healthcare workers and church leaders, and that meant they were always willing to help, even when we didn't have much ourselves. I'll tell you a story. My dad once sold our TV, the only TV we had, to help someone who needed the money. It sounds so altruistic now, but as a kid, I was really pissed at that. And I'm kind of still pissed at it. Our home was never really just ours.
There was always someone staying with us, someone who needed a meal, someone who they just could not turn away. But that spirit shaped me. When I started a school lunch program, I was not trying to end world hunger. I was a 21-year-old university student trying to help kids in my community of Reru, a town that's outside Nairobi, the capital of Kenya.
Back where I grew up, kids in my neighborhood did not end up like me. While I went to school well-fed, ready and able, they went to class on empty stomachs. And as a result, many of them were held back and others dropped out. But I know every single one of them saw their potential being wasted. Hunger was a thief of opportunity, one that we had to stop before it swallowed us all.
So as a nutrition student, I started researching on school feeding programs, but what I mostly found was flawed systems and broken promises. Across Africa, a lot of the food supply was run by foreign organizations, and it was aid-based. They relied on warehouses full of imported food, sidelining local producers and not involving local communities or governments.
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