Wawira Njiru Wins 2026 DVF Award After Turning School Meals into a Project Serving Hundreds of Thousands
Kenyan entrepreneur Wawira Njiru, founder and chief executive officer of Food4Education, has received the 2026 DVF Award for Leadership as part of a group of women honored for their social and humanitarian impact.
Food4Education announced Njiru’s win on September 8, days after the annual DVF Awards ceremony in Venice, which honors women working to provide solutions to wide-ranging social challenges.
From a Small Project to Hundreds of Thousands of Meals
Njiru launched her initiative more than a decade ago with the simple idea of providing school meals for children. It later developed into a broad-based system working with schools and local communities and using payment and distribution technologies to organize meal delivery.
According to Food4Education, the organization now provides hundreds of thousands of meals daily through a large network of schools in Kenya, while also creating thousands of jobs and supporting local food- and agriculture-related supply chains.
A Model Linking Education and Nutrition
In her advocacy, Njiru emphasizes that school feeding is not a separate charitable activity, but essential infrastructure that directly affects school attendance, learning, health and the economic opportunities of families and communities.
The DVF Awards annually honor women who have demonstrated leadership and impact across a range of issues. Njiru was selected this year in recognition of her work expanding the school-feeding model and turning it into a scalable project.
Njiru’s story offers a clear example of an influential woman who combines leadership, management and social innovation, transforming an everyday problem into a sustainable system with broad impact.
