Early learning for Mozambican children

The first 5 years of life are widely considered critical for a child's growth and development. For this reason, we play close attention to the nutrition of our preschool students, measuring height and weight and tracking in relation to their age. The chart below shows the weight for age for female children at Bombôfo preschool at the start of the school year (February 2023).

The blue dots represent the children who attended MSLI's preschool last year, and the red dots represent the children who have not attended preschool yet. The blue line is the median weight-for-age, as defined by the World Health Organization. Children with measurements close to this line are in the healthy range. The red line indicates the weight-for-age that classifies a child as underweight. We are very pleased to see that only one female student who previously attended MSLI's preschool in Bombôfo falls into that category.

To improve the nutrition we are providing to the preschool students, in April, we kicked off a partnership with Higest, a chicken inputs company in Mozambique, which agreed to support the start-up of a chicken-egg cooperative in one of our villages. The Higest professionals trained a group of four farmers (three women) and donated 208 laying hens, the equipment, and enough chicken feed for the group's first month of production. The cooperative is now producing about 200 eggs every day, which MSLI is buying and integrating directly into our school lunch program for added nutrition for the preschool students.  Eggs have one of the most digestible forms for protein, and the kids love them! This project has been a sustainable way to increase access to nutritious foods for the preschool kids, while also benefiting the local farmers who are now earning an income by selling eggs.