Food for Thought School Lunch Program

Wild Nature Institute launched a program in July 2024, called “Food4Thought” with Armonk2Africa. This is a free school lunch program in one of our most underserved schools, Esilalei Primary School. Most of the children at Esilalei Primary School are unable to pay for school lunch and therefore the kids go through the entire school day without eating. Children cannot learn properly on an empty stomach and feeding them improves their attention spans and capacity to learn.

In partnership with the community of Armonk, New York, who raised more than $10,000, we were able to provide a healthy lunch of beans and corn for all 600 kids in the entire school every day for an entire school year, as well as pay a local Maasai woman to cook the food, thus providing another Tanzanian with steady income. The head teacher reports that attendance is up from before the free lunches were provided, and kids even come to the school during holidays for the lunch. After a full year of successful delivery of these free lunches, the kids are healthier and happier, so we decided to expand the program to two additional primary schools, Jangwani (700 students) and Baraka (600 students), where the kids also were not regularly eating lunches due to the inability of the parents to pay, and to prevent the temptation for these under-served communities to send all their kids over to Esilalei. This means Wild Nature Institute is providing free, healthy lunches for 1,900 children every single school day!

These three schools are located within savanna rangelands that are important movement routes for wildebeests, zebras, and elands, as well as giraffe and elephants. Thus, they are critical for wildlife conservation and these communities also experience conflicts with wildlife. 

At the beginning of October, we purchased a three-month supply of beans and corn for all three schools, enough for the remainder of the year. We organized celebrations at each school to introduce the program and show them the food, and everyone was so excited and happy.