Provide School Meals to 2000 Students in Tanzania

In Africa where Millennium Promise works, hunger and malnutrition are major influences on the quality and efficiency of the education systems. Hungry children have a harder time concentrating on their lessons and focusing on activities. Moreover, hunger factors greatly in the elevated school dropout rates that are found in impoverished African communities; these dropout rates in turn reinforce poverty. The school meals that you help purchase for students in the Millennium Village cluster in Tanzania are a simple and an effective intervention that not only alleviates hunger but also encourages children to enroll and stay in school.

Through the Millennium Promise’s school meals program, children in Tanzania receive the essential nutrients necessary for proper child development, which ultimately enhances their ability to learn. In 2008 alone with the help of your support, recent reports indicate 8,009 students in Tanzania benefitted from nutritious midday meals that were locally grown by small-scale farmers within and around their community. In turn, attendance rates improved, along with the children’s nutritional intake.

To the Millennium Village community members, the school meals are seen as an enormous incentive for parents to promote attendance and enrolment in school. Parents know that their children will eat well at school, and that they will not have to use limited family funds and time to prepare a midday meal. On behalf of the children in the Tanzanian Millennium Villages, their parents and all of us at Millennium Promise, thank you for helping make this progress possible and for joining us in meeting the Millennium Development Goals and ending extreme poverty in Africa.

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