Let's join ADRA in Mozambique to see how people's lives are being touched by their school feeding program.
“This kind of project was actually created by the government because they need to scale up nutrition and there is a need in Mozambique.”
“Right now, the chronic malnutrition rates are really soaring. They are above forty percent. And this is generally across the country. Although there are certain places where it’s higher. In Maputo also they discovered that it’s above thirty percent, which also includes districts like Boane. So that’s why we feel like it’s important that the students should also get part of the meal because they might not be getting enough.”
“When we started we had our school feeding funded by ADRA International. The other part of the donation was through the food that we are still receiving through Rise Against Hunger. Being part of this project they receive rice. The rice comes in a packet with soy and dehydrated vegetables. Inside each packet there is a multivitamin packet within the food that we distribute. So every time they get a ration size which is almost equivalent to 700 kilocalories, it’s in supplement to what they get from home.”
“When we started the project we did some anthropometry where we were weighing the height and the weight of the students and we analyzed it. Then we discovered that fifty percent of the students were really underweight. That was last year. We are going to consequently weigh the students. Right now we designed a cohort that we would follow up each month so that we have concrete results to see the changes are okay. What we have noted so far, there’s been an increase in the number of students. We started with 9,366. Right now we have 13,453 students. Last year when we ended we had 11,656 students.”
“Since 2017, the school feeding initiative has been improving the nutrition of 45,000 school children in Mozambique, Eswatini, Madagascar, Malawi, and Zimbabwe.”
