At Wasare school in rural Kenya, CRED Partner IDAK Foundation has supported the implementation of a feeding programme, such that all the children are able to get a hot meal in the middle of each day.
For some students, this meal is the difference between being able to complete a full school day or not. Packed lunches are not an easy meal in Kenya – bread is expensive, and with many rural homes having no mains power or a fridge, there is nowhere to store food from the night before to have as lunch the next day. And with food often taking an hour or so to make, there is no time to make it in the morning before school. So at lunchtime children who live close could go home to have a bit of freshly cooked food (if the parents are at home, and not out in the fields tending to the crops). But if they lived too far away, by the time they’ve got home and eaten, there is no time to come back and complete the school day, and so their school day might be the morning only.
For other students, this meal is the reason for them to come to school at all. When a child lives a 1 hour walk away from school, the parents will be reluctant to let them go whilst they are still small, knowing that they need to walk an hour there, and then an hour back before they can have their lunch. But with the introduction of the school meal programme, things have changed, and now the parents are very happy for their younger children to walk to school, as they know that a meal will be waiting for them at the end of that walk.
So for these kindergarten children, access to education has just got a lot easier, thanks to the introduction of a midday meal (which often constitutes rice, beans and greens).
