Aid in Africa | ft. Wawira Njiru and Soreti Kadir

Kenyan social entrepreneur and founder of award winning enterprise, Food4Education, Wawira Njiru is in town and you should know about her!

On a chilled out Saturday afternoon, join Manal Younus, in conversation with Wawira and Soreti Kadir at Afro Hub on Kulin Nations’ Land. We’ll be discussing our role as Africans living in the diaspora, in the development of the continent, the impact of foreign charities on the continent, race and racism in development and how we can better support African social entrepreneurs. This is an interactive event where questions will be taken from and asked to the audience throughout the session.

Tickets will be $10 at the door, food and drinks will be sold separately. Bring more cash if you like, this is a self funded event and any profits made will go to Food4Education.

Please contact us if you would like to promote an organisation.

WAWIRA NJIRU, is the Founder and Executive Director of Food for Education an organisation that works with vulnerable children in Kenyan public schools to improve their lives through a feeding program. She founded Food for Education in 2012 while doing her degree to address the inequality in education in her community of Ruiru Kenya due to inequality in food access.

Food for Education has provided over 120,000 school meals that have contributed to improved nutrition status, school attendance and performance. In 2016, the organisation opened it’s first central school based kitchen that currently provides highly subsidised meals to over 1200 students a day who primarily come from urban slum areas. Wawira is interested in development issues, especially how access to food influences education outcomes and how change in Africa can be led from within. She has been recognised as a Spark* International changemaker 2012, Transform Nutrition ‘Nutrition champion’ 2013, and a Hunger Free Ambassador.

In 2016, she was also selected as one of 25 young Africans Leading in Public Life by the University of CapeTown and in 2017 as one of 16 participants of the Global Social Benefit Insititute Accelerator Program run by the Miller Centre at Santa Clara University. She is also a Stanford d school scholar. Food for Education partners with World Vision Kenya, IDEO.org and other local organisations and corporations to continue to scale it’s reach.

Through it’s partnership with IDEO.ORG, the world’s largest design thinking company, Food for Education runs the Double Portion restaurant that sells food to the local community and profits cover the cost of subsidies for needy school children creating a human centred sustainable model. Wawira is currently undertaking a Masters in Public Health at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology and continues to work tirelessly to ensure that no child has to learn
while hungry. (We tried to cut down her bio buuuuut…)

SORETI KADIR is an Oromo poet, musician and writer based on unceded Kulin Nations land. Her artistry is a method of story and truth telling. What she speaks and writes on evolves with her and her experience but is vastly committed to identity, justice, equity and freedoms.

Soreti began her journey in the professional world at World Vision Australia where she worked in numerous roles, all showing her different spaces that make the aid and development world function. She was there from the end of 2012 until October 2014. After her experience in Ethiopia working on a collaborative project looking at understanding the stigma young Oromo people living with disability face, she began to wonder if working for World Vision was truly where she believed change was. This wonderment lead her to over the next and last year she spent at World Vision, realise more and more about the structures and systems fuelling inequality globally and with these realisations she began to feel that the traditional aid and development space was not serving the sort of change she once believed it did.

The end of 2014 saw her focus her energy at the grassroots through her co-founding of In Our Own Words and beginning of her public artistic journey. 2015 she self published her book of poetry Siyaanne and 2016 saw her make the move into music. The future is sure to be an exciting expression of Soreti’s multiple, growing, artistic disciplines.