OPINION: Trusted local enterprises are the future of school feeding initiatives

Kenya’s ambition to provide nutritious, locally sourced meals to millions of learners through the National Home Grown School Meals Programme is bold and necessary. With close to three million children reached in 2025 and a longer-term goal of ten million by 2030, the scale of the promise is clear.

National targets, however, tell only part of the story. The more difficult question is delivery, particularly in low-income urban settlements where the need is acute, and systems are fragile.

Nairobi’s informal, low-income settlements are dominated by informal schools, which account for 70% of school-going children in the city and still remain beyond the reach of initiatives such as Nairobi City County’s Dishi na County program, which currently serves public schools.

Charitable and donor-funded interventions have attempted to fill this gap, but these are often short-term and focused on specific nutrition or education outcomes, rather than long-term delivery systems.

Mainstream models tend to default to outsourcing: large caterers, centralised procurement and external logistics. While on paper this appears efficient, in practice it can weaken local ownership and detach feeding programmes from the communities they are meant to serve.

Another approach is taking shape, quieter, less visible in policy headlines, yet firmly rooted in local communities.  In this model, delivery is anchored in organised local enterprises accountable to the very families whose children rely on the meals. Schools do not just purchase food; they anchor local food economies.

The distinction matters. In informal settlements, markets operate as much on reputation as on paperwork. A vegetable trader, miller, transporter or cook survives because her neighbours trust her. When school feeding is delivered by enterprises owned and operated within the settlement, programmes earn something more durable than a contract: they earn trust.

Here, parents are not only recipients. They are also farmers, traders and suppliers. If food quality drops, feedback is immediate. If delivery falters, accountability is close at hand. Trust becomes the underlying guarantee for food safety and quality long before formal inspection systems intervene.

Across Kibra, Korogocho and Mukuru, agrifood traders and smallholder farmers have begun forming legally registered Local Business Associations. These associations help coordinate supply, improve post-harvest handling, and collectively engage with schools. Instead of dozens of fragmented suppliers competing informally, organised networks are able to meet agreed standards and deliver with greater reliability.

In practice, this coordination has changed how supply flows. In Mukuru kwa Reuben, agrifood traders, who previously operated in isolation, are now pooling resources under the banner of Mukuru Agribusiness Association to provide hot meals to informal schools in their vicinity. Through their recently established community kitchen, the association is introducing menus using diverse and nutritious foods sourced from local producers.

The initiative is moving towards aligning school demand with farmer production cycles, while incorporating basic handling standards to ensure quality and accountability. For informal schools, this redirects their focus on education outcomes and minimises children's exposure to highly processed, unhealthy snack meals. 

This reflects a growing recognition in School Feeding Program policy conversations: that strengthening farmer organisations and linking them with urban micro and small enterprises is not peripheral to school feeding, but central to making it work at scale.

When delivery is embedded in organised local enterprises, the benefits extend beyond the meal itself. Money circulates locally. A school pays a trader, who pays a miller, who sources from a farmer, and income returns to households through rent, school fees and everyday purchases. Feeding budgets begin to function as economic multipliers rather than isolated expenditures.

At a time when Kenya is grappling with youth unemployment, urban poverty and food price volatility, it is worth asking whether the success of school feeding should be measured only in cost per plate, or also in the resilience it builds within our communities.

Of course, questions remain about standards and scale. Can locally-rooted enterprises consistently meet nutrition and food safety requirements?

The experience of Kenya’s small-holder farmers in horticulture export supply chains suggests they can, particularly when supported by shared systems where localised initiatives such as the community kitchens and supplier groups operate under established regulatory guidelines for hygiene, nutrition and operations. Training and quality assurance are structured; ownership and relationships remain local.

While still in its infancy, the approach taken by Mukuru Agribusiness Association is already growing business capacity and creating learning opportunities for its members in food safety, procurement and basic enterprise management which are skills that will serve them beyond the school gates.

None of these demands is sweeping reform. It requires thoughtful choices about who is invited into delivery systems and how those systems are structured within local government planning processes and programs, such as county integrated development plans and through inclusive multi-stakeholder platforms such as Nairobi City County’s Food Liaison Advisory Group (FLAG) committee. Mapping local enterprises, strengthening their associations and embedding them into county procurement processes are not radical shifts and, over time, they may prove to be transformative.

School feeding will always be about children. But it is also about systems: who supplies food, who earns income, who develops skills, and who is trusted to deliver when shocks come. If Kenya’s school feeding ambitions are to endure, expanding not only in reach but also in impact, the future may lie less in distant suppliers and more in organised enterprises rooted in the communities they serve. School feeding works best when the people who cook the food are also the people who care most about its impact.

Rikki Agudah is an agricultural and sustainable agribusiness specialist and former Chair of the Society of Crop Agribusiness Advisors of Kenya. He works on inclusive food systems initiatives across Eastern and Southern Africa.