Post Harvest Food Security

A lack of school meals is a barrier to accessing education. - Why?

Firstly if you are hungry you start to focus on your hunger and not on what is being taught to you, you may get “Hangry” - irritable and irritating. You are not learning

Secondly a lunch time meal ought to be providing you with the vitamins and minerals needed for personal growth, including cranial growth, if you are not getting a healthy lunchtime meal your development is impeded.

How do school meals programme work?

Some charities buy and provide meals to children at schools, they do this for many reasons around access to and affordability of food. We at Mikuyu do not offer any food, we avoid creating dependency. We do this on the whole because we work in areas where farmers can grow food.

From the outset of our partnerships with communities and their school we talk about children sleeping in classroom because they are too tired. We ask if they want help building classrooms for their children to learn in or sleep in. We ask the community to set up feeding programmes to feed all the community’s children. We have the discussion about why families should help feed children from households that cannot make 100% contributions - it is not an easy conversation.

Having got to the stage where households are contributing maize and beans, no one wants their contributions to be then slowly eaten by insects or mice. This is where we have offered assistance. We have provided cement for the community to block up the holes in the store, provided mess for the windows and we have provided PICS bags. These are bags that are triple lined for added security. They sit on metal pallets to keep them off the floor.

When parents have faith in the safety of their contributions they are more willing to provide their food.

This post harvest food security is phase one in addressing food as a barrier to accessing education. Phase two will be to support the community to establish school garden that can sustainably grow fruit and vegetables.

Sieving the crops before bagging helps prevent “wadudu” (insects) fom getting in the bags