Entries by George Kaburu

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Kenya’s school meals ambition is growing. Now we need to make local procurement work

Kenya’s school meals ambition is growing. Now we need to make local procurement work

George Kaburu &
Rikki Agudah

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Kenya is entering an important moment for school meals

In September 2026, President William Ruto directed government ministries to develop the policy, financing, governance and implementation framework for a national school meals rollout beginning in the first school term of 2027, across all 47 counties.

The wider national ambition is to expand school feeding from roughly 2.6M learners to 10M by 2030. Then, in October, Kenya became the fourth co-chair of the global School Meals Coalition, joining Brazil, Finland and France.

These are significant commitments. But they also raise a practical question: As Kenya dramatically expands school meals, can we design the system so that more of the food, jobs and economic value behind those meals are rooted in local communities?

This question sits at the heart of work that APHRC, IFPRI and Wasafiri have been undertaking through the Scaling the Integration of Micro and Small Enterprises and Smallholder Farmers into School Meals Programmes in Urban Informal Settlements in Kenya initiative.

The work is testing approaches for connecting micro and small enterprises and smallholder farmers to school-meal supply chains, alongside strengthening demand for healthy and sustainable food.

The emerging experience is encouraging, but also sobering. There is demand. But demand alone does not make a market.

Across the initiative, local business associations (LBAs) are beginning to establish relationships with schools. Five preliminary supply agreements have been signed, initial deliveries have taken place, and further opportunities are being explored for 2027.

Different models are emerging too, from prepared meals to supplying food products through existing school kitchens. The work has also connected local enterprises to institutions such as MSEA and KENAFF, while the participating business associations report a membership base of 206 people, around 66% of whom are women.

These are important signals of what locally anchored school-meal supply chains could make possible. But the work has exposed an equally important lesson: school interest ≠ a signed commercial agreement ≠ a delivered order ≠ payment received.

Small suppliers can face 60–90-day buyer-credit exposure. Orders may lack validated quantities, priced schedules or approved credit. Schools themselves face affordability and procurement constraints. Local business associations vary in their ability to aggregate suppliers, manage compliance and fulfil orders reliably.

This matters enormously when we start thinking about 10M children.

National scale cannot simply mean multiplying what exists today. It means deliberately building the market infrastructure that allows school meals to become both a nutrition intervention and a dependable local economic system. So what needs to happen?

  1. Standardise school procurement. Schools and local suppliers need clearer arrangements covering products, quantities, quality standards, prices, payment dates and other costs.
  2. Finance the buying cycle. If suppliers are expected to wait 60–90 days for payment, many smaller businesses simply cannot participate. Advance payments, supply credit and receivables-backed finance are among the mechanisms worth testing.
  3. Build supplier-ready local business associations. Local sourcing requires more than locating farmers. Associations need reliable information about members, commodities and prices alongside the capacity to manage compliance, procurement and delivery.
  4. Ensure underserved and informal schools are part of the policy conversation. Evidence from APBET and other schools in informal settlements needs to inform the policy and budget case for expanding nutritious school meals, rather than allowing these schools and their communities to remain at the margins of national scale-up.

This is where Kenya’s two recent commitments matter.

A national scale-up to 10M learners creates potentially enormous and predictable demand for food. Kenya’s new leadership position in the School Meals Coalition creates a platform for the country to help shape the international conversation about how school-meal systems are financed and delivered.

The opportunity, in our view, is to connect those two ambitions.

  1. What if scaling school meals was not only about feeding more children, but also about building stronger local food economies around them?
  2. That means asking harder implementation questions now: How do we make procurement accessible to small food enterprises and farmers while maintaining food safety, quality and reliability?
  3. What financing arrangements protect smaller suppliers from late payments?
  4. What minimum capabilities should local supplier organisations demonstrate?
  5. And how do national and county governments, schools, financiers, farmers, SMEs and the School Meals Coalition collaborate so that successful local models can genuinely scale?

These were precisely the questions put to the Technical Advisory Group and School Meals Coalition TWG representatives during the 27 October stakeholder roundtable.

Kenya has set an ambitious destination. The next step is building the systems that can get us there.



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October 28, 2026 by
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From Dialogue to Action: The importance of diverse stakeholder voices in promoting healthy and sustainable foods

From Dialogue to Action: The importance of diverse stakeholder voices in promoting healthy and sustainable foods

George Kaburu

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As global food systems face increasing challenges, stakeholders across the food value chain are realising their role in promoting healthy and sustainable diets.

Scaling Micro-businesses for Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems in Kenya (KenyaSME4Nutrition) was a two-year project funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and implemented by Wasafiri, Village Enterprise, and Shack Dwellers International (SDI).

The story of the Kenya SME4Nutrition project

While the food environment in Kenya is rapidly evolving with the expansion of formal retailing such as supermarkets, microbusinesses are the main channel through which most households in both urban and rural communities access their food.

The KenyaSME4Nutrition project aimed to show how microbusiness owners can be agents for catalysing agri-food systems towards healthy and sustainable foods, with a particular focus on extremely poor women in both rural and urban areas.

This project also sought to identify the conditions that can influence micro businesses to contribute to equitable food system transformation.

The research team examined incentives for businesses to change, the factors that influence demand, and how they are shaped by gender.

Scaling the impact of agri-food businesses is a complex problem, particularly in the context of promoting healthy and sustainable diets. Creating a platform for dialogue and collaboration between food businesses, local governments, policymakers, civil society, and other stakeholders is essential.

The project’s engagement pathway, depicted in Figure 1, broadly outlines the target stakeholders and policy opportunities. It was integrated into the project design to offer more detailed information about the target stakeholders and the methods used for communication and involvement.

Stakeholder engagement enables everybody’s feedback, perspectives, insights, and concerns to be taken into consideration and fed into the decision-making process. Through this process, relationships are built along with a sense of ownership and shared responsibility for the research objectives.


Central research question
Figure 1

Three things informed our stakeholder engagement approach:

  1. The external context that is dynamic and showed us where the windows of opportunity were.
  2. The knowledge products to be generated and how they could be targeted to different stakeholders to effectively put the research into use.
  3. Limited resources and time constraints determined the strategic choices on where to target our efforts.

At the county level, we built on the entry points identified at the onset of the project linked to established stakeholder engagement processes. We also built on their networks and the rapport they had created with policy stakeholders at the county level (for example, Village Enterprise had existing rapport with the county government).

In addition, a clear window of opportunity for policy influence was obtained in all three focus counties (Bungoma, Nairobi, and West Pokot) following the Kenya elections of August 2022.

Ana Nikolic and George Kaburu
Ana Nikolic and George Kaburu

Three stakeholder engagements were held in Bungoma, Nairobi, and West Pokot counties, with attendees from county governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and the business community. Through these engagements, stakeholders exchanged knowledge, shared experiences, and built networks crucial for helping scale the role of MSEs in promoting healthy and sustainable diets.





Watch a summary of the Nairobi session

The Stakeholders’ Commitment

Despite the main objective of the project being to generate new knowledge on how businesses and market systems might influence the growing consumption of healthy and sustainable foods, the project activities have triggered a change of mindset and a focus toward action.

From the dissemination meetings carried out in the three counties, county governments, local business associations, and community-based organisations have committed to strengthen their collaboration post-project, amplify the findings of the research, and accelerate policy change. Notably, policy and programmes supportive of agri-food businesses are to increase the supply of diverse healthy food and interventions put in place to increase the consumption of healthy and sustainable diets.

In Bungoma, the County Government together with The Kenya National Chamber of Commerce and Industry – Bungoma Chapter will continue convening with other actors to facilitate market linkages, access to training and advisory services, policy advocacy, and information and practice sharing.

In West Pokot, a stakeholder from Equity Afia committed to driving socio-behaviour change communication (SBCC) to address low household dietary diversity and quality through interactive educational programmes in local radio stations.

Finally in Nairobi, the County Government opened its doors to the Food Liaison Advisory Group – a multi-stakeholder platform representing the voices of various food system actors.

The stakeholders’ ultimate commitment was to continue collaborating to prioritise actions and measures that support and encourage the growth of agri-food businesses that are committed to promoting healthy and sustainable diets as well as creating an enabling environment that allows consumers to make informed choices about their food consumption choices.

What we learnt

We concluded that food systems are increasingly transitioning with growing evidence of shifts in dietary patterns and increased consumption of relatively unhealthy energy-dense foods, and low intakes of healthier whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and pulses in both urban and rural areas. Markets and enterprises play a central role in influencing food choices and diet quality, both in the urban and rural-agricultural contexts.

Strengthening food systems outcomes (nutrition, equity, sustainability, health) requires collaboration across different types of actors within the food system and beyond. Building a knowledge-policy-governance interface is necessary for food systems transformation and needs to include the development of new alliances for impact at the local level, creating a compelling story for policy change and finding opportunities to influence practice and implementation.

The emerging concern for all the stakeholders is now to move beyond strategies and towards policies and program interventions.



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June 8, 2023 by
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Here’s how systems-thinking led to a breakthrough in tackling poverty in West Pokot

Here’s how systems-thinking led to a breakthrough in tackling poverty in West Pokot

George Kaburu

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A renowned Kenyan Economist posited that the main challenge facing the country today is the tension between ‘politics of the economy’ and the ‘politics of development’. He goes further to explain how this is shaping the political discourse both at the national and (devolved) county levels. And the Kenyan public is fully engaged in this discourse.

Whereas Kenya’s Vision 2030 sets out a national goal for the elimination of extreme poverty, it has been criticized for being too capital-intensive and therefore struggling to adequately address extreme poverty in many parts of the country. Some county governments have embarked on a deliberate action to address this by turning the aspirations of devolution into practical efforts having effects in people’s lives.

Through an Open Society Foundation funded ‘Economic Justice Programme’ project, Wasafiri and Village Enterprise, in collaboration with the County Government of West Pokot, have successfully integrated poverty graduation into the county’s social protection programming. This was achieved in two ways:

  1. The birth of the first-ever county government Policy on Poverty Graduation in 2020.
  2. The development of a sessional paper – a legal regulatory framework that legalizes the operationalization of the poverty graduation policy- this was approved by the entire members of the West Pokot County Assembly in 2021.

Subsequently, two other policies were formulated by the County Government of West Pokot; the climate change policy and climate financing policy.

Change is Collective

The approval of the Poverty Graduation Policy was the culmination of a county-owned and led multi-stakeholder process closely linked to and leaning on the West Pokot County Integrated Development Plan’s (CIDP) mission “To Transform Livelihoods through Equitable and Sustainable Utilization of Resources”.

The focus of the CIDP is on food and nutrition security and improving equity in socio-economic opportunities, and this partly speaks to the reasons why poverty graduation has resonated so strongly in West Pokot – the first county in Kenya to develop a county-wide approach to ending extreme poverty.

This policy seeks to eliminate poverty by 2025, an ambitious goal and timeframe. In 2021, the West Pokot County Government has requested assistance from Wasafiri and Village Enterprise with the start of implementing the policy.

An evaluation done by Wasafiri and Village Enterprise during the project’s inception phase showed that government officers had a limited understanding of poverty graduation and its effectiveness in eradicating extreme poverty. Apart from low capacity, there were no guidelines on policymaking, and inadequate or no funding for poverty graduation programmes.

Four ‘areas of focus’ were articulated as a priority to address this:

  1. Effective targeting due to limited resources
  2. Layering of existing poverty eradicating interventions for extremely poor households because existing programmes are resourced, operating at scale and are the best place to start
  3. Galvanising resources and adapting existing programmes
  4. Effective monitoring

Implementation Approach

The design and implementation of this one-year ‘exit’ project draws from substantive engagement and learning from the activities and lessons during the project’s inception phase. It is hinged on three (3) key pillars:

  1. Strengthening capability and commitment to implement the policy focused on the four ‘areas of focus’ mentioned above through systems leadership coaching, and technical assistance
  2. Advocacy through lobbying for budget allocation, targeting of the extreme poor and influencing the 2023 – 2028 County Integrated Development Plan (CIDP)
  3. Capture knowledge of what works for learning and further capacity building

An innovative systems leadership coaching that ‘made it matter’

Wasafiri has deployed its expertise as a systems change agency to design and deliver individual and group systems leadership development coaching sessions to the policy Technical Working Group (TWG) drawn from the political, administrative, and selected community actors in West Pokot.

The format was in-person, four sessions over a four-month period and delivered as individual and group coaching.

From the Country Government, the individual coaching targeted senior policy technocrats from key departments, i.e., agriculture, budget, education, planning, trade, and social protection. The group coaching sessions targeted a broader stakeholder group comprising four County Executive Committee members (Ministers) and selected community actors and women groups who will play different critical roles that will lead to the operationalization and prioritization of the policy.

The foundation for the coaching was Wasafiri’s Systemcraft model – a framework for how we believe anyone can drive systemic change. It focuses on collective, adaptive, and experimental action on the system.

The purpose of the coaching is to strengthen the collective and adaptive capacity of the Technical Working Group (TWG) to implement the policy and achieve three outcomes:

  1. Secure budget allocation for the Poverty Graduation Policy (PGP) for financial year 2022 / 2023.
  2. Evolve and adapt existing programmes to support poverty graduation policy implementation.
  3. Integrate and scale scaling up poverty graduation within Country Integrated.

At the wrap up of the systems leadership coaching, we have evidence of success:

  1. Treasury has allocated KES 4.5M to operationalise the committees of the policy at county, sub-county, and ward levels and for identification of the policy’s target population, i.e., the extremely poor.
  2. The Treasury Department at the Country has taken full responsibility for taking the policy forward and strategically placed itself at the fulcrum of poverty graduation policy implementation across the whole of government. This is major progress and enhances the durability of implementation due to the influence that Treasury has in the budget process, and they have committed to ringfence allocation towards the policy.
  3. There was a strong endorsement of the coaching by the Head of Planning and the four County Chief Executives (CECs) who expressed the desire for Wasafiri and Village Enterprise to return and provide more systems leadership training to the County Government post the August 2022 elections.

Raising awareness, sharing lessons, and generating new support

The close of the systems leadership coaching ushers in an important phase of advocacy and learning whose goal is to secure the long-term sustainability of the poverty graduation efforts. Whilst this work is still ongoing significant achievements have been made so far.

  1. County Government of West Pokot is now using the policy to identify programmes under the current county development blueprints to either adopt or evolve them to support poverty graduation policy implementation. These are programmes that address the most acute aspects of poverty in West Pokot, I.e., marginalization, equality, and equity.
  2. Capacitating the County M&E department to develop a standard targeting tool to identify the extreme poor. This tool will be used by the county government to identify beneficiaries of graduation programmes at the county, in this case the extremely vulnerable.
  3. Village Enterprise continues to strengthen the agency of the local citizenry through education and awareness delivered through a series of interactive community radio shows.
  4. Village Enterprise with support from Wasafiri will also benefit from three (3) learning forums, one with the North Rift Economic Bloc (NOREB), a forum that brings together member counties from the North Rift regions to work together as a team on matters economy followed by a learning visit at the Council of Governors (CoG) to share best practices among devolved Governments and lastly participation in a national graduation stakeholder forum in April this year convened by BOMA and bringing together the County Governments of West Pokot and Marsabit.

What next?

Sustainability of the project is grounded on the effective stakeholder engagement processes and strategic direction and deliberations that promote ownership and cooperation among implementing partners, i.e., Wasafiri, Village Enterprise and County Government of West Pokot.

Looking beyond the August 2022 elections in Kenya, we see additional pathways to continue scaling the project mobilising for more resources from development partners to support in the identification of the extreme poor including set-up and roll-out of a robust management information system (MIS), a scaled-up citizen engagement through interactive community radio shows and additional systems leadership coaching and technical assistance in response to expected transition.

Read more about our work in West-Pokot

The challenge of eradicating extreme poverty… lessons from West Pokot, Kenya

Cause for celebration! How Kenya’s first ever County Poverty Graduation Policy was born…

Photo by Rathnahar Sriom from Pexels



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March 2, 2022 by