top of page

From Soil to School Plate: How a Kenyan Community is Rewriting the Story of School Feeding

  • 7 days ago
  • 6 min read

Field Visit to Inaarok Lukuny Comprehensive School and Mashambani Women Group, Namanga, Kajiado County — May 2026

What does it take to transform a school lunch into a catalyst for community resilience? In the semi-arid landscapes of Kenya's Kajiado County, the answer is taking root in the school farms, kitchen gardens, and women-led cooperatives emerging from a bold pilot programme reshaping how communities think about food, farming, and the future. On 14th May 2026, a field visit team travelled to Namanga, Kajiado County, to see the results for themselves.
The Challenge That Started It All
Kenya's government-supported School Feeding Programme (SFP) has long been a support system for families in the arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs). However, recent research across SFP schools revealed persistent delays in food supply, inadequate quantities, and meals that were calorie-sufficient but nutritionally poor.
The evidence pointed clearly to the need for a different approach. In April 2025, a stakeholders' policy roundtable was convened by a project team led by the Kenya Agriculture, Livestock, and Research Organisation (KALRO), working on school meals and regenerative agriculture initiatives. In Nairobi, the convening brought together researchers, policymakers, and community partners to chart a new course. The recommendation was clear: establish pilot school farms as living learning centres where nutritious food is grown, shared, and taught, and where communities are at the centre of the solution. Partnerships with local farmers, women’s groups, and school 4K clubs could facilitate community and student involvement in the centres. 
Four schools were identified as early adopters. Two in Kajiado County — Kumpa primary school and Inaarok Lukuny Comprehensive — and two in Isiolo — the School of the Deaf and Kilimani Primary. Each became a hub for a localised Community of Policy and Practice (CoPP): a voluntary consortium of partners united around transforming local food systems.
A School Farm Taking Root
School children harvesting vegetable crops in school farm in Kenya.
Inaarok Lukuny Comprehensive School sits in a landscape defined by sparse rainfall and the constant pressure of drought. Yet arriving at the school farm, the scene tells a different story. Maize, beans, African indigenous vegetables, green grams, bananas, oranges, and pawpaw grow in organised blocks. A newly constructed poultry unit houses chickens. Vertical gardens climb the walls, a space-saving, climate-smart innovation.
The school farm that began with uncultivated land now covers four acres. High-iron nyota beans and assorted nutrient-dense vegetables — including kale, spinach, onions and tomatoes — fruits — including bananas, oranges and pawpaw — and and green grams harvested here are now used to fuel the SFP, supplementing the traditional staple of maize and beans with the nutrition children need to concentrate, grow, and thrive.
"When we harvested the bean, it was cooked and we all ate. It was sweet." — Jeremiah, 4K Club student
"Most of us have never eaten cowpea, but I must confess it was very sweet. The vegetables have improved the taste of our food." — Student, Inaarok Lukuny Comprehensive School
School children gathered around a tub of vegetable crops in Kenya.
The school's 4K Club is the agricultural student society that anchors the farm. Local extension staff provide training, while regenerative and climate-smart agricultural (CSA) practices guide the work. Parents, once invited to the school gates only to deliver firewood, are now active participants in farm labour and soil enrichment, regularly providing manure from home livestock stables.
"Before the project, parents could only provide firewood to the school. However, with the school garden as a learning centre, parent participation has increased — they now provide labour in the school farms and manure." — Parents' Chairman
The shift, notes the Parents' Chairman, runs deeper than agriculture. This is a community where large families, drought cycles, and competing livelihoods have historically made keeping children in school a challenge. Something is changing.
"Our community is polygamous, so we tend to have many children and education is not a priority, especially during droughts. However, the current socioeconomic transitions have made our community send their children to school." — Parents' Chairman
Learning by Growing: The Classroom Extends Into the Garden
School children stirring large pot of cooked vegetable in Kenya.
One of the most powerful dimensions of this initiative is its alignment with Kenya's Competence Based Curriculum (CBC), which champions learning through doing. For teachers at Inaarok Lukuny, the farm is not an extracurricular add-on, it is the classroom extending into the open air.
"We as teachers now find it easy to teach agriculture in our classes since we teach theory in classes and practise on the school farm." — Violet, 4K Club Patron
And the results are measurable. School leadership reports improved learner concentration and academic performance directly linked to more consistent access to nutritious food.
"Since the provision of food in schools, there has been improved concentration by the learners, thus improving their educational performance." — Mr Mwanda, Head Teacher, Inaarok Lukuny Comprehensive School
Mashambani Women Group: Where Farming Meets Economic Power
Members of the Mashambani Women Group in Kenya standing in the school farm together for a photo.
A short distance from the school, thirty women have formed something that is becoming transformative. The Mashambani Women Group, based in Namanga, is a structured cooperative with a clear leadership, shared skills, and a collective vision.
Through the school farm programme, members have been trained in a suite of CSA practices: tied ridges for water conservation, grafting of fruit tree seedlings, silage formulation for livestock feed. They have adopted these practices on their own farms.
"Our main economic activity is the sale of milk, so some group members have embraced dairy farming since they now understand how to make silage." — Grace, Vice Chairperson, Mashambani Women Group
The kitchen garden training has had perhaps the most immediate daily impact, changing what families eat at home by bringing vegetables and high-iron beans directly onto household plates.
"We have also been trained on the establishment of kitchen gardens, which has been useful in our household consumption." — Janet, Mashambani Women Group member
One group member speaks candidly about the gendered dimension of this transformation. In a community shaped by patriarchal norms, women's independent economic activity has historically been constrained, but as men in the community have seen nutritional and financial benefits flowing into their own households, their attitudes have started to shift.
The group's vision is to grow into a large women's cooperative, generating income from farm produce that pays for school fees and other investments. To get there, they require additional training so that group members can become trainers for other women in the community, and a borehole.
Continued Challenges
Water remains the defining challenge. Inaarok Lukuny sits in one of Kenya's driest regions, and the school farm's current irrigation depends on water collected from hillside catchments into storage tanks. This becomes difficult during seasons of poor rainfall.
"We have increased our land under crop production, but we need a reliable source of water." — Head Teacher, Inaarok Lukuny Comprehensive School
A solar-powered borehole has been identified as the long-term solution. The farm also urgently needs a perimeter fence to protect crops from encroaching livestock and occasionally grazing herbivores — a common pressure in this pastoral landscape.
Looking further ahead, the school's vision is bold: to become a national model of food self-sufficiency, producing enough to sustain the school's dietary needs and sell surplus from at least four acres of cultivated land. Getting there will require continued investment in infrastructure, water, and the ongoing support of the CoPP. Critically, the programme will focus on sustainability, investigating how schools and women's groups can continue once external seed support from KALRO ends.
The Bigger Picture: A Food System in Transition
School children in Kenya standing together for a photo while they eat their school meals.
What Inaarok Lukuny and Mashambani offer is more than a successful pilot. They offer a proof of concept for a different kind of food system that starts with the soil, centres local knowledge, integrates women's leadership, and nourishes children and the community both mentally and physically.
The work is ongoing. Phase two of the programme is now scaling the production of nyota beans, vegetables, and green grams into more schools and women's groups across the region. The learning centres are becoming nodes in a growing network of community-led food system transformation, led by regional CoPPs.

This blog is part of a series aiming to convey the results and progress of the Food Systems Transformation Through School Feeding Project, funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Rockefeller Foundation under the Catalyzing Change for Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems (CCHeFS) initiative. The Regenerative Food Systems Alliance is committed to documenting, supporting, and scaling community-led approaches to food system transformation. This visit was conducted by the Kenya research team in partnership with local Community of Policy and Practice members.

For more information please contact:



bottom of page