Mary’s Meals

Mary’s Meals is one of the charities that runs school feeding programmes in Kenya. It believes that a mug of maize-based, vitamin-enriched porridge provides the nutrition a child needs to be healthy and an incentive for them to go to school, in the long term offering a simple route out of poverty.

There are 2,113 children at Njenga primary school, which means a lot of porridge needs to be prepared. The cooking and day-to-day management of the project are done by a team of volunteers, including some of the pupils’ parents and grandparents.

Many parts of Kenya have experienced three or more failed rainy seasons, and the UN believes this is the start of a crisis that could become a lot worse without international support. ‘Life has never been easy for the poor in Kenya,’ said Bukard Oberle, the World Food Programme’s country director in Kenya, ‘but right now conditions are more desperate than they have been for a decade. Red lights are flashing across the country’.

Mary’s Meals also runs other programmes to remove barriers to education. Its Backpack Project encourages children in the UK to donate their old schoolbags and fill them with equipment such as notebooks, pencils and a spoon – small gifts that make the school day in Kenya more practical.

Despite its location in one of Nairobi’s most notorious slums, Njenga primary school has some of the best exam results in the country. Teachers credit this to the regular supply of nutritious food, which they say aids concentration and gives children a reason to keep coming back.

Schoolgirls enjoy their Mary’s Meal. 

http://www.marysmeals.org/index.html