Kenyan charity issues contactless wristbands to students for discounted meal payments

FAST FOOD: Tap2Eat enables Kenyan students to pay for school meals via an NFC wristband

Kenyan social enterprise Food for Education is speeding up the rollout of its Tap2Eat NFC cash replacement system for subsidised school meals following a successful pilot in three primary schools in Nairobi involving 150 students.

Food for Education plans to extend the system to 12 schools by the end of July, a spokesperson told NFCW.

To pay for a meal, students use a Tap2Eat NFC wristband which is linked to their parents’ account.

They tap the wristband on a NFC reader, which debits the cost of the meal and sends a notification to their parents letting them know they have eaten. The whole process takes less than five seconds.

The organisation is introducing the payment system to help it expand its feeding programme from 3,000 to one million students a day.

“We are currently feeding about 3,000 children per day and for these numbers to scale to the one million that we plan to, we need to get more efficient in the payment system,” said Food for Education’s general manager Fred Obondo.

Food for Education has been running its feeding programme for public primary school children in Kenya for seven years, providing subsidised meals that cost 15 Kenyan shillings (US$0.15).

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