The Giga Kitchen by Food 4 Education, Nairobi County’s School Feeding Program, “Dishi Na County,” partner serves over 60,000 nutritious meals per day by supplying food to the surrounding public primary schools.
The giga-kitchen uses sustainable energy infrastructure that includes the use of eco-friendly scrap wood briquettes to run two boilers to heat water and create the steam needed to cook over 60,000 meals a day.
The School Feeding Program ‘Dishi Na County’ which was launched by Governor Jonhson Sakanja ensures that children get hot nutritious meals to curb malnutrition, promote academic performance, and encourage school enrollment.
The kitchen and its satellite kitchens have also created job opportunities for the city residents, which have impacted positively by transforming the lives of families in poor neighborhoods, and ensuring the school-going children get a meal with only 5 shillings using the tap-to-eat wristband.
The Dish na County initiative, implemented by the Nairobi city county, targets public primary schools and early childhood education centers in its jurisdiction.
The initiatives involve the establishment of centralized kitchens known as Giga Kitchens in strategic locations, from which food is prepared in large scale and transported to the eligible schools.
The aim of the initiative is to provide hot nutritious and balanced meals to children at highly subsidised cost as a strategy to improve their nutritional status, increase school enrolment and performance.
The establishment of the centralised kitchens is based on the premise that it reduces the cost of construction, food purchase, preparation, labour, and energy that would be incurred in setting up separate kitchens in all the schools within the county.
In Kenya, school going children and adolescents spend most of their time in school, about 75% of the year, where they consume more than half of their daily meals.
The school environment is, therefore a suitable platform for promoting and providing healthy diets as a strategy to reduce the risks of malnutrition and realise the right to adequate food and nutrition for children as envisaged in the constitution.
Recognizing the critical role of schools in children’s lives, both in education and nutrition, the Government of Kenya and development partners initiated the School Meal Programme in 1980, aimed at providing mid-day meals to children in public primary schools especially those in arid, semi-arid areas and urban slums that are prone to droughts and food insecurity.
In 2009, the school meal program was restructured into a more sustainable and nationally owned Home-Grown School Meals Programme (HGSMP), which prioritizes the local food supply to schools.
Under the HGSMP, the Government disburses funds directly to schools and provides guidelines in key aspects of school meals, such as the nutritional composition of food baskets, adequate procurement processes and monitoring/evaluation.
The schools then bear the responsibility of procuring foods that are locally produced and culturally acceptable.
Some schools have established school gardens to supplement the school meal program, but inadequate space, farming inputs and poor attitude, knowledge and skills in farming hinder school gardening and optimal production for those who are already implementing school gardening.
Furthermore, most of the government led school meal initiative do not cover private schools. As such, even the low cost private schools from urban slums do not benefit from school government’s meal initiatives, despite the high levels of malnutrition, poverty and food insecurity in the communities that they serve.
Lack or inadequate school meal infrastructure and facilities such as storage facilities, kitchens and energy saving methods, dining spaces and water supply also impede the implementation of school meal programs.
School with poor or inadequate storage facilities often experience food spoilage and wastage and have to procure perishable goods on daily basis and discard any food remains, which is non-economical and inconvenient.
Inadequate and intermittent water supply to schools also is a key challenge in implementing the school meal program, especially for schools that have not installed water storage facilities.
In such cases, water shortage compromises food safety and hygiene increase the risks of contamination and food poisoning to the children.
Some schools still use traditional cooking method such as firewood, which is not only time and energy inefficient, but also a source of pollution in the school and the surrounding environs. The study conducted raised concerns of poorly (undercooked), non-fresh foods and encountering smoke in their offices and classrooms as result of poor storage and cooking facilitie
