The kids kitchen: daily meals in the wake of Covid

Thanks to your continued support, 230 school children at the We Are the Future primary school in Sierra Leone now enjoy a daily meal using fresh produce from their school garden. Potatoes, corn, beans, cassava, onions and yams are all flourishing there thanks to the school garden’s water irrigation system. This season, thanks to a greenhouse (very rare in Sierra Leone), there has been a bumper crop of lettuce.

This has provided the children with lots of iron rich greens, and what’s more, because lettuce is a sought-after food in Sierra Leone, the school has sold the surplus to hotels and restaurants, so it can plough the funds back into the school garden.

Our school garden project has had other spin offs too, like encouraging parents to start their own gardens. Mr Kanu, who lost his job two years ago, has two children at the school and he was reassured to know they were getting a good meal every day. When he learnt that the food was coming from the school’s own garden, he decided to follow the example and to start growing his own food.

Because he didn’t have any outdoor space, he used old buckets, tyres and bags as makeshift planters. Seeing how difficult this was, staff from We Are The Future helped him set up a proper ‘home nursery’, where he now grows green vegetables, including lettuce and spring onions, as well as keeping chickens for eggs. This is helping provide the family with a better diet, and cutting their food bill by about £40 a month.

This is a successful and sustainable solution to hunger, but we can only fund more wonderful projects like this with your continuing support. Thanks for helping us make sure children in Sierra Leone have enough food to GROW.

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