The Ministry of Education (MoE) has put in place measures to ensure the continuity and sustainability of the School Meal Programme (SMP), bringing in 1.7 million more learners into the programme in response to President William Ruto’s directive to reach 4 million learners in the current 2023/2024 Financial Year.
The programme is being managed by the National Council for Nomadic Education in Kenya (NACONEK).
The programme, which began being implemented by the Government of Kenya (GoK) in the arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL) with support from the United Nation’s World Food Programme (WFP) in 1980 before being transitioned to the Government under Home Grown School Feeding, currently benefits 2.3 million vulnerable learners from food insecure areas.
The MoE further plans to develop and operationalize a national School Meals Policy (SMP) to enhance existing school meals guidelines and develop a plan towards Universal School Meals Coverage (by the year 2030).
The SMP is currently operationalized in 26 ASAL counties using two modalities: in-kind modality for 11 counties and cash– transfer modality for selected schools in the remaining counties. All special needs schools are covered in the programme.
Mechanisms are also underway to develop a third modality of centralized kitchens, which will be implemented in the informal urban settlements of the 7 major cities and towns of Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, Nakuru, Eldoret, Kitale and Thika.
In June this year, President Ruto presided over the ground-breaking ceremony of the Nairobi School Meals Programme Kitchen’s construction at Roysambu Primary School in the company of area Governor Johnson Sakaja.
Through the initiative dubbed ‘Dishi na County’, 17 kitchens will be constructed in various parts of the county, with each kitchen serving between 10 -15 schools.
The central kitchens are designed to prepare high quality, affordable and nutritious meals in large volumes and allow a flexible payment platform that widens meal access and generates real-time data.
Once the food is prepared, it is packed into sealed containers ready for loading and distribution using a fleet of trucks which reach schools within a 20km radius of a central kitchen.
The process of serving combines a nutrition-focused model with a unique ‘Tap2Eat’ technology, a payment platform that allows parents to pre-pay through M-Pesa to an online account.
Each child in the programme is issued with a wristband and upon receiving a meal, a cashless payment is made by tapping the wristband onto a digital device that will be in operation at the point of serving the meal.
According to the county, the system drastically increases access to school meals by lowering the cost to parents who are positioned either to pay daily or weekly according to their economic circumstances.
The three-year renewable agreement, signed between the Ministry of Education led by Education Cabinet Secretary Ezekiel Machogu and the Nairobi County Government led by Governor Sakaja, aims to scale up the feeding programme for over 1.9 million school-going children in all public schools.
Other plans include expanding the scope of school feeding gradually to include all the Special Needs Schools and the Camp- Based Refugee Schools, and introducing fortified food supplements to address hunger and severe malnutrition in lower primary in the targeted schools.
According to NACONEK, the SMP has made a significant contribution to reducing hunger and improving nutritional intake, thereby enhancing primary school completion rates and learning outcomes in regions it has been operational.
By Roy Hezron
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