Sakaja Arthur Johnson: A heart dedicated to the youth
From 14 to 16 October 2024, Nairobi City County Governor Sakaja Arthur Johnson took part in the Bloomberg CityLab 2024 summit.
It was the occasion for the Governor to share the vision put in place since 2022 with his team. Nairobi City is putting food at the center of the Kenyan capital’s push to build a bridge between young people and their government. His signature policy, a program to subsidize school lunches, aims to care for a vulnerable population while showing the young, fast-growing city what its government is capable of.
“It’s preparation for the future”, Sakaja said in an interview on the sidelines of the Bloomberg CityLab conference in Mexico City. By 2040, the city’s population is expected to double to 10 million people, many of whom will have grown up “with that foundation that government can care, government can love, government can fill us [up],” said Sakaja. When Sakaja took office in 2022, a quarter of kids in Nairobi were missing school because of hunger. It prompted his government’s launch of the “Dishi Na County School Feeding Program”, which leans on centralized kitchens across the city to serve subsidized food to hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren at the cost of roughly five US cents per meal.
Since the program launched in 2023, test scores, attendance and enrollment have increased, Sakaja said. It’s an immediate solution to a serious school hunger issue and a long-term investment in the city’s well-being, he added. Students access the meals through a wristwatch with near-field communication technology that holds the payments and dietary information, and collects data on who is utilizing the program. Some kids pay for their meals through that watch, while others with no money in their accounts are served for free, meaning “the child does not know when the parent doesn’t have money.” That NFC technology was developed to allow for “dignity” in the process, according to Sakaja.
Bio Express
Hon. Sakaja Arthur Johnson was elected the Governor of Nairobi City County, Kenya, in August 2022. Governor Johnson is working to realize a vision of Nairobi as the Green City in the Sun, a nickname derived from the city’s foliage and warm climate.
Johnson previously served as Senator of Nairobi. During his tenure in Parliament, he served as Chairman of the Standing Committee on Labour and Social Welfare and as Vice-Chairman of the Standing Committee on National Security, Defense and Foreign Relations. He also served as the chairperson of the Kenya Young Parliamentarians Association.
Johnson has been nominated among the top 100 Future Leaders: The World’s Most Influential Young People in Government (2018) by Apolitica and awarded Change Maker of the year 2016 at the African Achievers Award, in recognition of his leadership skills and youth empowerment in Kenya. Johnson was elected to represent the 13 C40 cities in Africa.