KENYA: Food for Education launches cashless payment system

Karen Muriuki

Social enterprise Food for Education, which runs a feeding program for public primary school children in Kenya, is piloting a cashless payment system to enable parents pay for the subsidized school meals via mobile money.

Speaking on the challenges of using cash Food for Education’s founder, Wawira Njiru said:

“In the time we have been running the program we have found that using cash has become cumbersome with the children often losing the money.”

Food for Education has been running for seven years by providing affordable, nutritious and high quality food to students at heavily subsidized price of 15 shillings.

NUTRITIOUS MEALS

Speaking on the solution, Managing Partner at Wapi Capital Paul Ndichu said:

“One in every four of Kenyan population is in public primary school; that’s about 12.5 million children who need reliable ways to access subsidized nutritious meals and we believe this technology is most advanced and yet adoptive to achieve this.”

General Manager for Food for Education Fred Obondo said that efficiency in the payment system will help scale to feeding one million children per day from the 3000 children they feed currently.

Eddie Ndichu, managing partner at Wapi Capital also commented on the technology behind the cashless payment system.

General Manager for Food for Education Fred Obondo said that efficiency in the payment system will help scale to feeding one million children per day from the 3000 children they feed currently.

PILOT PROGRAM

“This solution which we have dubbed as Tap 2 Eat links each parents account to their child who is in turn given an NFC ‘smart watch’ and students just tap to an NFC-reader which debits the amount for the day, sends a notification to the parent alerting them that their child has eaten. All this happens in a matter of seconds,” he said.

The pilot program is currently running in three schools in Nairobi as the organization seeks to scale up the operations to all the schools where Food for Education is currently running its feeding program.

Food for Education is a social enterprise that provides subsidized, nutritious meals to students in Kenyan public primary schools to improve their nutrition and education outcomes.

Wapi Capital is an Africa based company that is focused on funding and technology driven innovative products and service (Fintech) for daring reputable organizations looking to establish transformative products and strategies using new technology.

SOURCE:NAIROBINEWS