60% of youngsters in Kenya can’t rely 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 improvement for a majority of the nation’s younger folks. It’s a lot tougher to study on an empty abdomen.
Find out how Food4Education scaled as much as serving half one million faculty meals a day with Cisco’s assist.
Wawira Njiru, Founder and Government Director of Food4Education, understood from the beginning that know-how was key to scaling up her operation dramatically sufficient to fulfill the each day dietary wants of a whole bunch of 1000’s of younger learners. Her group created a deeply tech-based answer to assist get rid of starvation and make 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. Through the use of a wearable wristband linked to a cell 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 World Citizen Prize for Youth Management to Wawira to create and take a look at this know-how. 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 supplied a know-how grant of Webex, Meraki, and Cisco Umbrella applied sciences. Our know-how permits Food4Education to gather and use knowledge analytics to reinforce their operations and choices, mitigate cyber threats, and securely join their operations, platform, and program choices. We additionally supplied a money grant to allow additional improvement and scaling of their program to assist 100,000 kids a day.
Immediately, over 500,000 kids can Tap2Eat lunch at college each day utilizing the Tap2Eat cell app and wristband. The wristband makes use of Close to-Discipline Communication (NFC) know-how to allow seamless transactions, making certain college students obtain meals with out the necessity for money or bodily contact.
Refined analytics and know-how 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 longer term.
Mother and father, philanthropy, and authorities all contribute to the price of each day meals—conserving 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 provides mother and father a really excessive stage of visibility,” she mentioned, “but it surely additionally provides kids a way of possession and a way of pleasure.”
In colleges that serve meals by way of Tap2Eat, truancy is sort of zero. Educational efficiency is enhancing, and attendance has elevated by as much as 30% in lots of areas.
Collaborating to attain exponential impression
Cisco’s partnership with Food4Education, the progressive use of know-how, 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 fundamental vitamin and high quality training for everybody, whereas additionally demonstrating the ability of our incubator mannequin for nonprofits. By means of our distinctive strategy, we scout for excellent concepts and dynamic founders, after which assist their early-stage, tech-enabled ideas by way of implementation, validation, and scaling.
For Cisco, funding nice concepts is just the start. We carry the perfect of Cisco—our know-how, 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 ebook about our fantastic relationship with Cisco!”
She explains, “Cisco has given us follow-on funding to enhance our use of know-how 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 colleges, to serving to us by way of our conferencing and our means to speak and collaborate higher.”
See the story in movement
With Cisco’s assist, Food4Education is altering a whole bunch of 1000’s of lives day by day—and counting—fostering the following era of learners and getting ready them to take part totally within the fashionable financial system. To get the total story, watch our newly launched documentary-style video.
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