Together with Turkana
We're launching an urgent appeal to feed chronically hungry children in Turkana, one of the driest and most impoverished parts of Kenya.
Mary’s Meals serves nutritious meals to more than 23,000 children in nurseries in Turkana, but primary-aged pupils have not received meals since a school feeding programme run by another organisation stopped operation around a year ago.
Desperate pupils can often be found watching children at neighbouring nurseries being fed, and younger children grow up knowing that the daily meal will stop when they move to primary school.
Now we are appealing for donations so we can start providing life-changing meals to 67,000 children in primary schools in Turkana.
Daniel Adams, UK Executive Director of Mary’s Meals, says: “With 85% of children in Turkana living in poverty, the promise of a meal at school is essential. We have heard heartbreaking reports of children as young as three years old saving their food to take home for hungry siblings.”
Margaret, a single mother of four from Akatuman settlement in Turkana, lives with the heartbreaking reality that two of her children receive a meal at nursery and the other two go hungry at primary school. She struggles to feed her older children. “When there’s nothing to eat, they just sleep hungry,” she says. “For my children not at the nursery, I don’t always have money for food.”
Daniel continues: “People in Turkana say, ‘no smoke, no school’ because a school with no food holds little allure for hungry children and their parents.
“We are ready to serve meals in primary schools, ready to take away the trauma for pupils of seeing others receive food while they go without, and ready to ensure these children gain an education which can be their ladder out of poverty. But we need funds to reach them.”
We are determined to continue feeding children who already depend on our school feeding programme while expanding, as funds allow, to reach primary school children in Turkana.