Comfort International, together with Good News International, has started supporting the School Feeding Programme in order to support children from poor families who can’t afford to pay for school lunches. The programme started at Bisesero and may possibly be extended to other schools in the future. The school has a total of 734 students. Every child needs to pay a monthly fee to be able to eat school lunches. According to the school, 40% pay the school feeding fees well and regularly, 25% try and pay some but not all of the money, and 35% are completely unable to pay anything.
Those who don’t pay for lunch have to go back home for lunch or stay around the school without having anything to eat while they are waiting for the afternoon session. The majority stay because going back home is a long journey to walk, and many times they also have no food for lunch at home. Most of the time when we visited the school at lunchtime, we met them watching others eating through the windows.
We talked to the parents, the students themselves, and school leaders in order to know the effect of this problem on the student’s education and whole life in general. They told us the following:
- Many children drop out of school because they do feel not safe studying in that environment
- Poor performance, because they don’t really study in the afternoon as they are very hungry and sleepy.
- Poor discipline, as some of the students develop the habit of stealing food from the neighbourhood of the school. Some students go into the people’s fields to steal food which they can eat raw.
- They develop bad relationships with their brothers and sisters and they are very angry with their parents because they think they are responsible.
- They don’t play games with other children
All this can be summarized by low attendance which leads to dropout, poor performance, and unhappy children.
The Objectives that Comfort International and GNI have in their involvement in the school feeding program are:
- Increase school attendance
- Improve school performance
- Help the children to live a happy life
In the beginning, we started by paying the school feeding fees for 40 students from the poorest families in Bisesero. Together with parents and school leaders, we have captured some baseline data for all 40 students, which will help us to do the monitoring and evaluation of this program at the end of the second trimester of the academic year 2022-2023.
The photos show some of the parents of the 40 students. One day Callum asked us if we are abandoning the existing communities by moving to support young people. Here is the answer. Among the 40 parents, 32 are already members of our existing community of Bisesero. They feel that it is the best way to support their community through supporting their young children in order to help them prepare their future.