"School can be a place where children's minds and bodies are protected," explains Eliezer, a teacher at CS Bethel School in the city of Goma, describing how the dynamics of his classroom have changed since Good Food at School became part of the school curriculum. In a region shaped by conflict and instability, this might sound idealistic, but in Goma and Bukavu, it is part of a broader effort in using schools to reconnect a fractured urban food system, from what children choose to eat, to how young entrepreneurs can earn a stable income.
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The city of Goma has a population of around two million people living on the shores of Lake Kivu. The region has faced repeated armed attacks, including major escalations involving the M23 rebel group. These conflicts have disrupted food supplies and essential services and have forced large parts of the population to move across the vast territory of the Democratic Republic of Congo and beyond its borders. Bukavu, to the south, faces similar pressures.
In this context, local associations and civil society organisations continue to seek ways to address the population’s basic needs, including access to food. Furthermore, the nutritional situation in the region has been alarming for decades. Approximately six million school-aged children suffer from chronic malnutrition, and more than 40% of them are stunted, meaning their growth and development are slowed by poor nutrition, threatening their cognitive development and the country's future human capital.
Several factors contribute to this situation. For example, school feeding policies have remained fragmented and underfunded in the aftermath of independence in 1960, resulting in low investment in infrastructure and a poorly organised food environment in schools. As a result, parents, who often give their children pocket money to buy snacks, do not always make the connection with the associated health risks, while vendors also offer starchy and carbohydrate-rich foods that are not approved or authorised for sale in schools.
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At Rikolto, our mission is to make sustainable and inclusive food systems a reality, and schools are a strategic entry point for this transformation. In the cities of Goma and Bukavu, we are working to improve access to affordable, nutritious, and healthy food for schoolchildren, while creating opportunities for local actors such as food vendors and young entrepreneurs running MSMEs to secure a more reliable and stable source of income.
Schools are great places to connect the dots between all of these actors. Pupils, teachers, and local actors can learn about food and work together to improve what is made, sold, and eaten in their school and neighbourhood.
Through its Good Food at School initiative, supported by the Gilles Foundation, Rikolto and its local partners work with 16 pilot schools in Goma and Bukavu. By 2025, the initiative reached 16,674 pupils (including 8,511 girls) and trained 240 pupil food ambassadors to lead peer awareness-raising activities on healthy eating and hygiene in schools. Similarly, teachers have been trained to become multipliers of knowledge and practice.
In Goma, for example, 23 teachers (15 men and 8 women) have incorporated healthy eating and hygiene lessons into their school routine. Two hours a week, they cover topics such as balanced diets, food groups and their nutritional functions, to clarify the link between diets and health.
Teachers reported that pupils now discuss healthy food choices more frequently and are more attentive to what they are eating throughout the day, a level of engagement that was absent before the initiative began. As Eliezer explains:
"Before this programme, many children came to school with highly processed snacks, which caused fatigue and drowsiness, making it difficult to supervise them after break time. Today, children eat more natural products, regain their energy and, above all, their hope. When a child eats well, they learn better... Teachers are also noticing this transformation: they are teaching children who are more attentive and motivated."
Keza Bwema Inès, a third-year pupil at C.S. Adventiste Béthel, reflected on how the food pyramid lessons have influenced her water consumption and her family's food choices:
"I'm starting to drink a lot of water because I'm convinced it's essential for staying healthy. My parents now favour fruit and vegetables and prepare balanced meals for me. I now drink natural juices and eat fewer sweets and fatty foods."
In Bukavu, the programme reaches over 11,351 pupils (5,576 boys and 5,775 girls) in 10 schools. There, 150 student ambassadors promote good hygiene and nutrition practices among peers and their families. Nine school gardens supplement menus and double as environmental education sites.
At The Perfect School, the headmaster, Mr. Bahati Kikuni Justin, shared that “even a nursery school child knows that they must wash their hands before eating and that you don't eat just any food. These practices have become part of the culture at our school. “
In some schools, pupils also help to prepare food, learning the golden rules of hand washing, vegetable cleaning, and nutrient-preserving cooking. But behaviour change inside the classroom is only half the equation; for new habits to stick, the food available outside the school gate must also change.
In the Bagira district of Bukavu, Claude Maniraguha Kampunzu, 29, runs a small food business called Bon Service. He supplies doughnuts, sambusas, cakes enriched with local ingredients and fresh milk to the Bangu Institute’s school canteen. Before partnering with the initiative, Claude operated like many small vendors, navigating fluctuating demand, limited technical training and thin margins.
Through support from SOKO LETU, an online marketplace that connects cooperatives and farmers with consumers, he received training in food hygiene, menu enrichment, and portion planning aligned with pupils’ budgets. In nine months’, time, his daily school revenue more than doubled, rising from 82,500 Congolese francs to 175,800.
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‘This collaboration with schools has enabled us to double our turnover and diversify the products we offer. I am confident that I can continue to sell every day while complying with food hygiene and safety standards.”
For young entrepreneurs operating in an environment marked by insecurity and economic volatility, predictable school demand can provide stability.
In 2022, Rikolto and local partners launched an agri-food business incubation programme called "Generation Food." As part of this initiative, young entrepreneurs with agri-food enterprises have received mentoring and technical assistance to support them in accessing new markets.
This process laid the foundation for linking youth-led enterprises to schools. At the same time, the need to strengthen the entrepreneurs' resilience led to the creation of structured platforms where they could organise themselves.
In Bukavu, for example, GIE-GAKI (Kivu Agripreneurs Group Economic Interest Group) operates under the business name SOKO LETU and has 100 members offering over 240 products. Through this network, they coordinate deliveries, share technical advice, and manage inventory collectively. A similar platform, GIE-MAVUNO SAFI, functions in a parallel role in Goma.
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These groups are making their operations and legal status more formal, thereby helping them to withstand market shocks while also making possible a stable market in schools. As a result, fourteen youth-led businesses now collectively supply over 13 tonnes of safe, nutritious food annually to nine school canteens in Bukavu. This supply includes 11.6 tonnes of essential staples, such as legumes, vegetables, and fortified beans, complemented by 1.42 tonnes of nutrient-dense snacks and bites. While this physical supply chain is currently centred in Bukavu, the programme’s reach extends to thousands of students in Goma.
To support this growth, digital platforms like SOKO LETU allow for more coordinated procurement, reducing delivery costs and adapting products to pupils’ needs and family budgets. Perhaps most importantly, it has increased business profitability by reducing the cost of fruit deliveries and helping vendors to adapt their products to the needs of pupils and family budgets.
Civil society organisations, including the Consumers’ Rights Association, LICOSKI and INNOVERT, as well as parents and school managers, are the real 'champions' of these initiatives in schools. Rikolto has built on their commitment to further these processes. In cities where the government has a limited presence, this local coordination not only helps to fill governance gaps, but also guarantees that these actions carry on. So, to make all these actions real co-created processes, we have set up a governance platform with them. The agenda will go from providing guidelines to the food business partners of the Good Food at School interventions, to forming task forces for concrete projects.
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The next steps with this platform are to keep pushing for mobilising decision makers to understand the cost-efficient nature of investing in healthy school programmes, also to advocate for a better policy environment for the local food business, and finally, seek for collaborations to improve food literacy for schools.
The current and future moves of SOKO LETU and GIE-MAVUNO SAFI are centred on expanding and diversifying their offer to schools, using Rikolto's networks. They are in conversations with a new cooperative, for example, to have more volume and variety of products. In Goma, a very exciting prospect is that we are connecting them with another initiative, "One House, one healthy garden", a peri urban agriculture initiative that Rikolto is facilitating. These are 111 home agroecological vegetable home gardens that we are accompanying that we expect to commercialise through GIE-MAVUNO SAFI. We are also in discussions with the SCPNCK (Société Coopérative des Planteurs et Commerçants de Café du Kivu) to link their offer of bio-fortified beans with the platforms, so they can offer and deliver to schools.
Concretely, with schools in Bukavu, for example, there are plans for the testing of fruit tree cultivation to supply the needs of 12 schools. There, with the different club and ambassadorship initiatives run by pupils and adolescents, we'll keep supporting them now, aiming to also expand their learning, participating in school contests and events. We see them as the leaders of healthy food in schools, so we'll see how we can keep them inspired and engaged with all this exciting vision for good food at school.
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