How School Feeding Is Opening New Markets for Farmers

Every morning after harvest, Hellen Kamunda loads her produce and heads to the New Mbeere Farmers Cooperative in Embu County. She is not looking for a broker. She stopped doing that.

For years, brokers set the price. Farmers accepted it because they had no storage, no collective bargaining and no guaranteed buyer waiting at the other end. Selling alone after harvest, when everyone else was also selling, meant selling cheap.

The cooperative changed that arithmetic. Farmers now bring their maize, beans and sorghum to a shared storage hall where produce is weighed, recorded and aggregated before it goes to institutional buyers. Among those buyers are schools participating in Kenya's home-grown school feeding programme.

"Once farmers aggregate their food together, they cut the burden of brokers who usually give very poor prices," Hellen says. "The farmer can get a good amount of money which helps to pay school fees and improve their lives."

From brokers to reliable buyers

The logic is straightforward. Schools need food every day. Local farmers grow food every season. The gap between those two facts is a market that, until recently, smallholder farmers could not access alone. But access to markets is only part of what smallholders need. Without financing to invest in inputs, storage and equipment, even a guaranteed buyer is out of reach.

"Financing the first mile means financing the farmers who are producing the food," says Mariatu Kamara, IFAD Country Director in Kenya. "You cannot talk about agriculture if farmers do not have the resources to grow it."

Under Kenya's home-grown school feeding model, food served in schools is increasingly sourced from nearby farms. The Kenya Guidelines on Food Production for School Meals provide the operational framework that helps farmers align what they grow with what schools need. For smallholders, this creates something that has historically been hard to secure: predictable demand.

I felt very humbled to see the children eating the food that we have produced. It makes us proud to know the food is clean, safe and helping them grow.
 

Stronger harvests, stronger farmers

Production has also improved. Farmers in the cooperative have adopted soil conservation methods, water harvesting systems and climate-smart techniques that stabilise yields even when rainfall does not cooperate. In a region where weather patterns have become harder to predict, that resilience is not incidental to the programme. It is the foundation of it.

"Climate-smart agriculture is essential if farmers are to maintain production under increasingly unpredictable weather conditions," says Farayi Zimudzi, FAO Representative to Kenya.

Hellen has seen the difference directly.

"Before we were introduced to these technologies, production was very poor. From one acre of maize we could harvest only 30 or 40 kilograms. Now we can harvest three to five bags even when the rain is poor."

Better yields matter. But yields without markets stay in the store. What the school feeding programme adds is a buyer that does not disappear.

During one recent harvest season, a single farmers group sold maize, sorghum and green grams worth more than 100,000 Kenya shillings through the cooperative. The income went back to members, who invested in livestock, water tanks and farm improvements.

Linking farms, school meals and nutrition

The work in Embu draws on complementary support from FAO on climate-smart farming, IFAD on rural financing and cooperative strengthening, and WFP on connecting harvests to school procurement systems. Each contributes a different piece. None of it works if the others are missing.

What is being built, quietly, in cooperatives like this one is a local food system where agriculture, nutrition and education pull in the same direction. Farmers gain reliable buyers. Schools receive fresh food. Children eat better.

Hellen puts it simply.

"I felt very humbled to see the children eating the food that we have produced. It makes us proud to know the food is clean, safe and helping them grow."

That connection, between a farmer's field and a child's plate, is what the programme is trying to make permanent.

This joint programme is supported by the Joint SDG Fund in collaboration with the UN Food Systems Coordination Hub. We sincerely appreciate the contributions from the European Union and the governments of Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland in accelerating progress towards the SDGs.