The Children Stopped Coming to a Nairobi Library at Lunchtime. So the Library Started Cooking

Children in Nairobi kept dropping out of library programmes because they had to go home for lunch, so Book Bunk started feeding them: more than 140,000 meals so far. How two restored libraries became civic hubs, and what still has not been measured.

Sunil Totti had a job interview with an international tech firm coming up and a worry he could not shake: at home in Eastleigh, a crowded district in the east of Nairobi, the electricity cuts out without warning. What if it went in the middle of the call? Then he remembered he had somewhere to go. Eastlands Library, a short walk away, has steady power, free internet, computers and a room full of other people looking for work.

He is 26. He graduated in 2023, first in accounting, then moved into software, and wants to end up in fintech. As a boy he avoided the same library because it was, in his words, a "very old and dusty place". These days he spends eight or nine hours there on most weekdays. "This is where I work, actually," he told Reasons to be Cheerful, which published his story on 25 September 2026.

A festival that needed a venue

In 2017 the writer Wanjiru Koinange and the publisher Angela Wachuka were looking for somewhere to hold a literary festival and went to see the McMillan Memorial Library in central Nairobi. They found crumbling walls, a flooded basement and books rotting on the shelves. When they went looking for whoever was meant to maintain the building, they came across two of its branches, in Eastlands and Kaloleni, in much the same state. The festival was dropped. The organisation they set up instead is called Book Bunk.

Lady Lucy McMillan built the main library in 1931 in memory of her husband, a settler who had come to Kenya on a hunting trip in 1904. For almost thirty years it served European settlers only. In 1958, a few years before independence, it was handed to the Nairobi City Council and opened to everyone. The Eastlands and Kaloleni branches came in the late 1960s, and of the four branches McMillan once had, they are the only two still open.

Who owns what

The arrangement is plain and deliberately unglamorous. Nairobi City County keeps the buildings and pays the core staff. Book Bunk raises the money, does the restoration and runs the programmes. The libraries stay public and free to enter. Kaloleni reopened in June 2020, restored during the first months of the pandemic, and Eastlands followed in July 2021. Work on McMillan itself is under way. Book Bunk puts the full bill at $7.6 million, from the roof down to a basement where a rare collection has to be kept away from water.

Before choosing what to put on the shelves, Book Bunk asked residents what they wanted. They asked for "more arts, plants and chill zones", sign language classes, and courses in digital and tax literacy. New books are bought partly from community wish lists. "You can actually go to a Book Bunk library and have fun," says Kimani Njogu, a cultural scholar who worked on the organisation's oral history project. "It doesn't have to be all about school."

Lunch

After the reopening, children started dropping out of the programmes. When staff asked why, parents explained. The answer was lunch. Children were expected home to eat in the middle of the day, and the trip home made the programmes impossible to keep up with.

A library could have answered that with a poster about attendance. This one started serving food. According to the World Resources Institute, it has now handed out more than 140,000 free meals to children.

The figures since then come from Book Bunk itself and should be read that way. The organisation reports more than 192,000 direct users of the two restored libraries and some 45,000 people in its free education, arts and well-being programmes. It says patronage is up by more than 240 percent and that the restoration created 93 jobs, 21 of them permanent, with over 400 local suppliers drawn in. It has catalogued 138,000 books, added 23,000 titles and put ten books by African authors into Braille. In 2025–26 the project was one of five finalists for the WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities. It did not win; the grand prize went to a transport coalition in the Philippines.

Why a building with electricity changes a neighbourhood

The American sociologist Eric Klinenberg has spent years on a question that sounds far from Nairobi. In July 1995 a heat wave killed more than 700 people in Chicago in about a week. Klinenberg compared two South Side neighbourhoods that sit side by side, Englewood and Auburn Gresham. They share a microclimate; both are poor, with many elderly residents living alone. In Englewood the death rate was about 33 per 100,000 residents. In Auburn Gresham it was 3, lower than in many affluent parts of the North Side.

What Auburn Gresham still had, and Englewood had lost, was small shops and busy pavements that drew old people out of their flats and into public life. Englewood had been emptied out by decades of abandonment, and its older residents were more reluctant to leave their homes. Klinenberg calls the difference social infrastructure. In a later book, Palaces for the People, he puts the public library at the centre of it, and Book Bunk took that phrase for its own mission.

Sunil's case fits the idea closely. The library did not give him a job. It gave him light, a connection and friends working towards the same thing. Along the way came occasional paid work writing blog posts and designing websites, and with it, he says, the sense that he is "starting to become stable financially". "It is not actually the space alone," he said. "For me, it was like a game changer."

What nobody has measured yet

The caveats come from the people running the project. So far the numbers count visits, and visits say little about what changed afterwards. Sharon Tarus, Book Bunk's communications manager, says the organisation collected baseline data and "knows employment has increased", but it has not yet put a figure on it. Njogu, who admires the project, says a proper evaluation would compare attendance, activities and residents' view of their area before and after restoration. Nobody has done that yet.

In school holidays Eastlands gets so full that Sunil sometimes arrives to find no seat. Around 600 children apply for holiday activities that can take about 200. When donations fall short, Tarus says, programmes are cut back just to keep the doors open.

Hardest of all is the partnership with the county. Permissions can take years, and each election brings new officials with whom the relationship has to be built again. "On paper, there should be a budget allocation to these libraries annually," Tarus says, "but it just doesn't translate." Njogu warns about where that leads. The county collects the taxes and remains responsible for public services, and a charity should not slide into being its permanent stand-in.

The Blueprint

Book Bunk now wants to take the idea beyond Nairobi. It has mapped 1,196 public libraries across Kenya, the first full picture of the country's library system, and is writing up its experience as a guide called the Book Bunk Blueprint. Njogu's advice is to start with a handful of counties and not to "expand too quickly as an institution". He thinks the model could work in cities like Dar es Salaam or Kampala, which are growing fast and have old public buildings standing half empty and too few free places for young people to study.

What travels is a habit rather than a floor plan: ask the people who stay away why, then fix the thing they name. Sometimes the answer is lunch.

Sources

Oliver Gordon, "Nairobi Is Transforming Neglected Libraries Into Vibrant Civic Hubs", Reasons to be Cheerful, 25 September 2026 — https://reasonstobecheerful.world/nairobi-libraries-civic-hubs/
Dan Dredger and Jen Shin, "Reviving Nairobi's Libraries Is Building Healthier Communities", World Resources Institute, 24 March 2026 — https://www.wri.org/insights/reviving-nairobis-libraries-builds-healthier-communities
WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities 2025–2026, project page: Book Bunk — https://prizeforcities.org/project/book-bunk
Book Bunk Trust, McMillan Memorial Library — https://bookbunk.org/libraries/mcmillan-memorial-library/
Book Bunk on Google Arts & Culture, "Little McMillans: Eastlands & Kaloleni Libraries" — https://artsandculture.google.com/story/little-mcmillans-eastlands-amp-kaloleni-libraries-book-bunk/CAWhJCb4b1ABhA
NPR Morning Edition, "Neighborhood Connections Key To Surviving A Crisis", interview with Eric Klinenberg, 3 January 2013 — https://www.npr.org/2013/01/03/168509385/neighborhood-connections-key-to-surving-a-crisis
Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, University of Chicago Press — https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo20809880.html