Wawira Njiru

Wawira Njiru is a Kenyan social entrepreneur and philanthropist, who serves as Executive Director of Food for Education (F4E), an organization that serves hot, nutritious and affordable meals to over 33,000 public primary school children in the urban and peri-urban areas of Kiambu, Nairobi and Mombasa counties.

A nutritionist by training, Njiru founded F4E at the age of 21, driven by her passion for universal education and belief that no child should have to learn while hungry. The organization has adopted an innovative approach to delivering subsidized meals to school children. With grant money from the Cisco Youth Leadership Award, Wawira scaled her organization five-fold in 2019, setting up the first central kitchen for school meals in Africa and developing the Tap2Eat cashless payment system, which enables parents to make $0.15 prepayments per meal via mobile money. F4E provides a subsidy to cover the remaining cost.

Njiru's ambition, simplicity of mission, and proof of impact has earned Njiru many accolades including the first-ever Global Citizen Prize for Youth Leadership presented by Cisco. She is the 2021 United Nations Person of the Year and the recipient of the World's 50 Best Restaurants 2022 Icon Award as well as the 2024 Skoll Award. In addition, Njiru is a 2021 Young Global Leader with the World Economic Forum, a 2020 Ford Foundation Global Fellow, and a 2018 Rainer Arnhold Fellow.