Cisco - Scan, Eat, Learn: Wearable Devices Help Young Learners in Africa Thrive

60% of children in Kenya can’t count on three meals a day. For children in underserved communities across Africa, education remains the surest path to a more secure future — and yet hunger inhibits learning and optimal development for a majority of the country’s young people. It is much harder to learn on an empty stomach.

Wawira Njiru, Founder and Executive Director of Food4Education, understood from the start that technology was key to scaling up her operation dramatically enough to meet the daily nutritional needs of hundreds of thousands of young learners. Her organization created a deeply tech-based solution to help eliminate hunger and ensure that school-going children have access to a healthy meal.

Food4Education’s innovative Tap2Eat system—a smart payment solution—ensures that children in Kenya receive nutritious meals at school. By using a wearable wristband linked to a mobile wallet, children can easily scan, eat, and focus on learning without worrying about hunger.

Scaling up from 3,000 to over 500,000 meals served daily

In 2018, Cisco awarded the Global Citizen Prize for Youth Leadership to Wawira to create and test this technology. At the time, the organization was feeding 3,000  children a day in Kenya. The funding enabled her organization to scale from feeding 3,000 children a day to 10,000 children a day while also developing their Tap2Eat app and platform.

In 2022, we provided a technology grant of Webex, Meraki, and Cisco Umbrella technologies. Our technology enables Food4Education to collect and use data analytics to enhance their operations and offerings, mitigate cyber threats, and securely connect their operations, platform, and program offerings. We also provided a cash grant to enable further development and scaling of their program to support 100,000 children a day.

Today, over 500,000 children can Tap2Eat lunch at school daily using the Tap2Eat mobile app and wristband. The wristband utilizes Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology to enable seamless transactions, ensuring students receive meals without the need for cash or physical contact.

Sophisticated analytics and technology to optimize outcomes

The system also verifies meal delivery to children and sends real-time data directly to Food4Education’s operational dashboards. This system ensures accurate tracking of meal quantities and uptake, enabling predictive analytics and more effective meal planning for the future.

Parents, philanthropy, and government all contribute to the cost of daily meals—keeping the program steady, scalable, and sustainable.

The effectiveness of the solution is undeniable—and the children are getting nourished in more ways than one. As Wawira puts it, “Every lunchtime, they’ll just go tap, so it gives parents a very high level of visibility,” she said, “but it also gives children a sense of ownership and a sense of excitement.”

In schools that serve meals through Tap2Eat, truancy is almost zero. Academic performance is improving, and attendance has increased by up to 30% in many areas.

Collaborating to achieve exponential impact

Cisco’s partnership with Food4Education, the innovative use of technology, and a dynamic business strategy based on community-centric solutions to longstanding challenges have helped the program grow and thrive.

Food4Education is a social impact partner that embodies our shared values around basic nutrition and quality education for everyone, while also demonstrating the power of our incubator model for nonprofits. Through our unique approach, we scout for great ideas and dynamic founders, and then support their early-stage, tech-enabled concepts through implementation, validation, and scaling.

For Cisco, funding great ideas is only the beginning. We bring the best of Cisco—our technology, our expertise, and our innovation—to the relationship. Setting our non-profit partners up for long term success and sustainability is always our goal. And it’s a goal shared with Wawira and Food4Education—as she puts it: “I could write a book about our wonderful relationship with Cisco!”

She explains, “Cisco has given us follow-on funding to improve our use of technology across the organization, from using Meraki across our operation, finding ways to connect all our devices that are used in Tap2Eat across a huge network of schools, to helping us in terms of our conferencing and our ability to communicate and collaborate better.”

See the story in motion

With Cisco’s support, Food4Education is changing hundreds of thousands of lives every day—and counting—fostering the next generation of learners and preparing them to participate fully in the modern economy. To get the full story, watch our newly released documentary-style video.

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