By Jonny Hellman | Communications Intern
Greetings from Freetown!
It’s now 3 years since we launched the Kids Kitchen Garden, and the project continues to thrive. 230 schoolchildren, many of whom faced hunger on a daily basis, are receiving a healthy, nutritious meal every day at We Are the Future School (WAF), all thanks to you. In a country where nearly half the population is food insecure, that’s quite an achievement.
The guarantee of a daily meal has brought a wide range of benefits: the children, no longer malnourished, suffer fewer health problems and perform better at school; and pressure is taken off parents, many of whom have large families to feed.
When we set up the project back in 2015, nothing could have happened without the generosity of donors like you. That remains the case today. So far, the cost of feeding a child through the Kitchen Garden project has worked out at around £2.28 (US$3.17) per child per week. That’s an extremely small outlay when you consider the life-changing impact that the project has had on the children at We Are the Future.
The Kids Kitchen Garden has also served as a model for tackling malnutrition in the local area. As Sierra Leone struggles to emerge from the devastation of the 2014 Ebola epidemic, large swathes of the population remain at critical risk of hunger, including children at other schools in Freetown.
Two such schools – the Cape Community School (310 pupils) and Christ Salvation Army Menonite School (150 pupils) – are just a stone’s throw away from We Are the Future. Not only do many of the children at these two schools go hungry, they do so while watching the children at WAF enjoy their daily meal!
When our programme director in Sierra Leone, John Donald Sandy, informed us of this heart-breaking situation we knew we couldn’t allow it to continue. So now, we want to expand the project; by building on the effective and sustainable model of the original kitchen garden, we hope to eventually feed up to 690 children at 3 schools in the local area, up from 230 today. With your support, we are changing children’s lives in Sierra Leone.
Keep up to speed with all the latest developments from the Kids Kitchen Garden through GlobalGiving, our website, social media, and our e-Newsletter!
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