Comfort International Feeding Projects are where Comfort International works with local partners to fight hunger among children and families in countries including Rwanda, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Burundi, the last three being among the poorest countries in the world. Sadly, there are still many children going hungry in these countries. Your support means that Comfort International can help make sure that school kids don’t spend the whole day without eating, nursery children get a healthy meal to fight malnutrition, and families don’t need to send their children out to scavenge food from the street. These are realities for many living in our partner countries, but you are helping to write a different story; one of a real childhood. Please find below a report of how the Feeding Projects are changing lives.
Emergency Feeding in the Democratic Republic of Congo
One of the most urgent emergencies that the Feeding Projects are aiming to address is the situation of hundreds of thousands of displaced people in the North Kivu area of the Democratic Republic of Congo who are in desperate need of food, clean water and medical supplies. In our last report, we explained how the children at Sake orphanage who were being supported through the Feeding Projects were evacuated due to the intensified fighting there. These children are now scattered throughout Internally Displaced People (IDP) Camps in the area. Our partners at Comfort Congo have been working hard to identify and support these children, along with many other children who have been orphaned in the war and those who are suffering severe malnutrition which is tragically claiming lives in the camps every day.
Our partners at Comfort Congo are visiting the camps around twice a week, feeding in the region of 2,000 children every week. Many of these children are suffering from severe malnutrition and/or other diseases relating to the crowded conditions in the camp. The children are fed porridge as well as dishes of rice, beans and a little meat and vegetables. Twice a week, Moses Kusimwa Mulimbo, the nutritionist of Sake Orphanage and Central Hospital Rusayu Nutritional Centre, goes to meet the children and dispense medication. He treats the sick as necessary with antibiotics, anthelmintics, pain relief, diarrhoea treatment and other medication, which is provided by the Comfort Congo Pharmacy. Many humanitarian agencies are working hard to try and provide resources and alleviate the situation in the camps but the need is immense and much more is needed to ensure many more lives are not lost. Our partners estimate that around $6,000 a quarter is needed to maintain the feeding only for these children.
School Feeding Programme
Comfort International works with Rwandan partners, Good News International (GNI) to provide school meals for children of low-income families in the Bisesero area of Rwanda. This area in particular has a high number of children who are unable to pay school meals for a variety of reasons. Many of the families in this area are subsistence farmers, and are unable to pay the small fee, around £3.50 a month, for their children to receive school meals. Sometimes, parents are forced to choose one of their children to receive school meals while the others go without. Being unable to eat all day at school takes a toll, and when we started the partnership with GNI over two years ago, the average attendance rate for the school was down at 64%. After just one term of school meals, attendance shot up to over 90%! Grades also went up, and the children reported themselves to be happier, while the teachers noticed a huge improvement in behaviour. This is a true example of how a little can change a life. Just a few pounds to pay for a child’s meals at school mean they can now focus on their education, opening the door for so many future opportunities.
This year, for the 2024-2025 year, Comfort International and GNI are supporting 96 children to receive school meals. These children are from the surrounding areas of Bisesero, Mubuga and Gishyita – all communities that GNI supports through their community programmes. At the start of every year, the teachers record a number of factors to see how eating school meals makes a difference to the individuals throughout the year, including attendance, grades, behaviour and whether the child identifies as “happy” or “unhappy” overall. According to the data, those students with good performance, happy, good discipline, and high percentage of attendance at the current time, are mostly those who were in the programme since last year.
We have also been working hard to see transformation within the whole community around Bisesero, an area which sees high levels of poverty and unemployment, partly due to the effects of the ferocious genocide here in 1994. This year, Comfort International and GNI finished a joint project to provide 20 houses for homeless families in Gishyita. You can read more about this project and how it is affecting the whole community, and helping more kids go to school, here.
Birara Nursery Nutrition
For the 2024-2025 season, Comfort International is supporting 69 nursery children to receive nutrition support – a healthy breakfast and lunch – at Birara Nursery. 43 of these children are newly enrolled for this year. Clement, from Good News International, who facilitate this project, wrote to us about how successful the project has been:
“From the beginning of the programme, the main objective was not only to feed the children well at school, but also to teach the parents how well they can feed their children in order to fight against malnutrition, even at home. In the beginning there were many children who were starting nursery with malnutrition signs. About 20% of the children always showed malnutrition signs, and some were very severe. Today the story is different, because after all the teaching and training of the parents, the situation is more positive. The percentage of the children presenting malnutrition signs dropped from 20% to 4%, and those signs are not as severe and can even be healed a few months after the children start getting some food at school. Our aim is to drop this number to 0% in the next 2 years.”
Historically there has been a high level of dropout of children in all levels of education in this area, including nursery school. The children who drop out of nursery school are less likely to continue on to any further education. The aim of the project is to eliminate the dropout of children at this age from nursery school. It also aims to see attendance rise from the current 89% to >95% (already vastly improved from when the project began). Overall, this project aims to restore a happy childhood to every child possible in this area. That starts with making sure they are happy, healthy, well-fed and free to access education and all the opportunities that this affords them. To help monitor the health and response of the children to the nutrition programme, some baseline data is collected at the start of the year, including weight, height, and upper arm size. These three measurements help to monitor the improvement and growth of the children after every trimester.
South Sudan Child Support
South Sudan in East Africa is the world’s poorest country according the Global Finance Magazine in 2024. In this young country, Comfort International works with a small team of dedicated volunteers who run the Child Support programme, working with struggling families and street children to try to work towards a better life. Many of the children are sponsored, allowing their school fees, food and accommodation to be paid for, but there are a number of children not yet sponsored, and often there are extra needs and costs, which is where the Feeding Projects step in. The Feeding Projects help make sure that children and families receive regular food in a country where Oxfam calculates that nearly 5 million people – 40 percent of the population – are facing extreme hunger.
Among the children whose lives are being changed through the South Sudan Child Support is Apiath, who has been on the project since she was five years old. Read about how Apiath’s life was totally changed in this blog post.
Comfort International supports nine Street Kids Rescue (SKR) Projects throughout Africa, and like our support in South Sudan, most of these are funded by individual sponsorship. However, the costs are not all covered by the monthly sponsorship, and so the Feeding Projects act as a buffer to make sure that all of the children on the projects have enough to eat and never have to face going back to the streets because of a lack of food at home. Every year at this time, Comfort International runs a special appeal to put on Christmas parties for the children on the SKR parties, making sure they have a day to remember the whole year through, with presents, games, activities and of course, Christmas dinner. If you’d like to contribute to the 2024 Christmas parties, please click here.
