Wawira Njiru is a Kenyan businesswoman, entrepreneur, human nutritionist, and philanthropist, who serves as the executive director of Food 4 Education, an organization that cooks, prepares and distributes nutritious meals, at subsidized prices to over 2,000 poor school children in Ruiru, a suburb of Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya.
At the inception of Food 4 Education in 2011, the initiative provided subsidised lunch to 25 children from underprivileged backgrounds in Ruiru. Through online campaigns to raise money to fund her project, Wawira was able to stay the course.
Her ambition, simplicity of mission, and proof of impact has earned Njiru the first-ever Global Citizen Prize for Youth Leadership presented by Cisco, awarded at the Global Citizen Festival: Mandela 100, presented and hosted by the Motsepe Foundation, on Dec. 2 in Johannesburg.
By 2019 the initiative was feeding more than 3,000 schoolchildren every day and employed 30 people including cooks and drivers. This is also Wawira’s full time job. She serves as the executive director.
In June 2020, she was among five Kenyans who were selected to join the Ford Global Fellowship run by the Ford Foundation - an American private foundation with the mission of advancing human welfare.
She is also a Stanford School alumni, the youngest recipient of the University of South Australia’s alumni award 2017, a 2018 Rainer Arnhold Fellow, a recipient of the Builders of Africa Award 2018 and one of 2018’s Top 40 under 40 women in Kenya.