Wawira Njiru is a social innovator and enterprise leader who has spent more than a decade structuring, financing, and operating large-scale public food systems. As the founder and CEO of Food4Education, she is redefining how governments, investors, and philanthropists invest in the world’s largest reserve of human capital: African children.
Food4Education works alongside families, schools, smallholder farmers, and governments to deliver school feeding systems that connect classrooms to farms along a locally rooted value chain. Today, what began as a passion project feeding 25 children has delivered more than 200 million school meals (and counting), employing over 6,000 people and demonstrating daily that school feeding is economic infrastructure.
Wawira’s leadership has earned her the Skoll Award for Social Innovation, the Audacious Project, and selection as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. She is inspiring a new generation of builders to look to their own communities for the solutions the world needs.