School Feeding Program

A daily meal is not always a reality for many schoolchildren in Ngombe, one of the poorest urban slums in Lusaka, Zambia. Thousands of Ngombe children go to bed hungry at night, and thousands attend school hungry the next morning. Tardiness and absenteeism due to hunger is a daily struggle for the students, the school directors, and the teachers.

The problem is compounded in Ngombe because a high percentage of these children are HIV positive, and they cannot take their government-provided retroviral medications on an empty stomach. To these hungry children, navigating the issues of daily life can often be overwhelming, and the future may seem hopeless. The gift of a nutritious noon day meal is a gift of life and hope.

Sew Powerful has recently partnered with a large relief agency, Convoy of Hope, to bring nutritious noonday meals to over 4,800 schoolchildren each day in ten community schools in Ngombe. All of these schools are already connected to the Sew Powerful program. This partnership is being called “The School Feeding Initiative”. The partnership is building kitchens, hiring staff, training the new hires, purchasing equipment, and preparing to usher in this feeding program in 2022.

The School Feeding Initiative will begin by feeding approximately 5,000 school children in the poorest sections of Ngombe.

Instead of choosing schools based on their assets, like nice buildings and available land, we did the opposite. We selected schools that didn’t have any western benefactors, or property of their own; that had no kitchens and no cooks.

Some community schools will be setting up kitchen areas in existing spaces, while others with no interior space available will be building sheltered outdoor cooking facilities.

Our newly-hired School Feeding Program Director, Seraphina Magawa, is supervising the planning and measuring for the outdoor kitchen construction, a project estimated to take approximately 2-3 months.

The School Feeding program will not only help to improve the children’s nutrition and overall health, particularly since so many are HIV positive, but will also help raise attendance, end tardiness, and increase enrollment.

The program will will also impact the community with additional employment opportunities and grants as well as the potential for future expansion.