Urban School Farming to Improve School Feeding

The Case of Nakuru Town, Kenya

Abstract

School feeding programs are an important development tool and relate to at least three of the Millennium Development Goals. School farming has been largely overlooked in the urban agriculture literature, but with many parents currently unable to afford school lunches for their children, it can play a vital role in reducing the costs involved in providing nutritional meals for pupils. This paper examines school feeding and school farming in an urban setting—Nakuru Town, Kenya—the extent to which school farming contributes to school feeding programs, and its potential benefits for children in combination with school feeding. The survey we conducted in almost all the primary and secondary schools in Nakuru shows that school farming and feeding programs are now common practice, but in relatively few cases does school farming substantially contribute to school feeding programs. Therefore, much more is possible and the paper indicates how various constraints in terms of land, water, support and leadership might be overcome.