Kenya is feeding more school children than ever before. But a full plate is not the same thing as a nutritious meal. Government-led school-meal programmes grew from 66 million in 2022 to 87 million in 2024.
According to the World Food Programme, Kenya’s national school feeding programme expanded from 1.8 million learners in 2023 to 2.6 million in 2024, with an ambitious target of reaching 10 million children by 2030.
Efforts to fight hunger are necessary and commendable. However, expanding access to school meals alone is no longer sufficient; success must be measured not just by the number of children fed but also by the nutritional quality of those meals.
Across Africa, the urgency to fight hunger is real. But hunger is not only the absence of calories. The right to adequate food, recognised in international human rights frameworks and in Kenya’s Constitution, affirms every person’s right to safe, nutritious, and sufficient food that meets dietary needs for an active and healthy life. For school feeding programmes, this distinction matters. Providing any meal is not enough; meals must deliver the nutrients children need to grow, learn, and thrive. Meals provided in schools incentivise attendance and retention and have the potential to improve nutrition, education, and health outcomes in both the short and long term. But the key question is, what are children eating in school?
Kenya operates a range of school feeding modalities designed to respond to different contexts, including in-kind food provision, cash transfers that allow schools to purchase food locally, county-led initiatives, and community-based school meals programmes.
Yet despite these efforts, a critical challenge persists: many school meals remain monotonous. Repetitive menus and a limited variety of food groups result in low dietary diversity and reduced nutritional adequacy. Local sourcing of school meals can go a long way in bridging this gap.
Research and policy engagements conducted by the African Population and Health Research Centre with policymakers, schools and food system actors across Kenya highlight systemic gaps that limit the participation of local suppliers in school feeding programmes.
Local sourcing from micro and small enterprises (MSEs) and smallholder farmers (SHFs) is a practical way to improve the nutritional quality of school meals. MSEs and SHFs play a significant role in food systems globally, particularly in low-and-middle income countries, and operate at multiple levels along the food value chain.
Evidence from Makueni County shows that engaging smallholder farmers in school feeding programs increased children’s access to fresh, locally-produced foods. Other African countries, including Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, and South Africa, have incorporated decentralised procurement systems that enable direct purchases from local farmers. A practical step Kenya can take now is to introduce a minimum local procurement requirement within school feeding programs, for example, mandating that at least 30 per cent of food served in schools be sourced locally, with clear prioritisation of nutrient-dense food groups such as legumes, vegetables, fruits, meat, eggs, and dairy.
The question is no longer whether we can deliver a basic meal to a child in school, but whether we can design school feeding programmes that reach children at scale with healthy foods while also stimulating local economies.
The writer is a nutrition scientist at the African Population and Health Research Centre (APHRC)
