Wawira Njiru

Wawira Njiru is the Founder and CEO of Food 4 Education, a social enterprise on a mission to eradicate childhood hunger in Africa and unlock the potential of a new generation, one hot, nutritious, and affordable school meal at a time.

A trained nutritionist and seasoned entrepreneur, Wawira is the architect behind F4E’s blueprint to scale sustainable school feeding in Africa. Designed to be locally rooted, scalable, and replicable, this innovative model works in partnership with smallholder farmers, parents, logistics suppliers, and government to deliver excellence from source to spoon. Under her leadership, the organization has grown from feeding 25 children in 2012 to serving 400,000 children a day and counting. Today, F4E directly employs more than 3000 people – mostly parents – and impacts thousands of businesses across local supply chains in Kenya with plans to expand across the continent.
 

As a leading industry voice in shaping food systems of the future, Wawira has received numerous prestigious awards for her work, including in 2024 the Skoll Award for Social Innovation, the Elevate Prize, and UPenn's Lipman Family Prize. She was the first recipient of the 2018 Global Citizen Youth Leadership Prize presented by Cisco, the 2021 United Nations Person of the Year, and the recipient of the World's 50 Best 2022 Icon Award. She is a 2021 Young Global Leader with the World Economic Forum, a 2020 Ford Foundation Global Fellow, and a 2018 Rainer Arnhold Fellow. In 2024, F4E was recognized as one of TIME 100’s Most Influential Companies which highlights the exceptional companies making an impact around the world.