Meals make all the difference

Meals make all the difference to children in Sierra Leone

It’s lunchtime at a small, rural school. There’s a queue of children, talking and laughing as they wait for a plate of hot, nourishing food. Munjama is one of them – she can’t wait to eat!

Thanks to you, Munjama and her friends can count of a good meal every day at school. Your generous gifts help give Munjama, and other children like her, the energy to play and learn. 

“Sometimes I cannot afford to feed my children”

says Munjama’s dad, Amara.

Like most parents at the school, Amara grows food, but if rains fail or it floods, crops are lost – leaving the whole family to go hungry. At times when food is short, Amara at least knows Munjama will eat well at school.

“To be in school is my dream”

says Munjama.

She’s determined to make the most of every opportunity and dreams of becoming a nurse. Thanks to you, children like Munjama have the chance of a better future. And it all starts with food.

Extreme poverty is high in rural parts of Sierra Leone. The district where Munjama and her family live has one of the highest rates of poverty nationally, with one in three families unsure where their next meal will come from.

School feeding — a daily hot meal during school time — ensures vital nutrition for girls and provides an incentive for families to send their daughters to school rather than being sent to work or an early marriage.

In 2018, WFP relaunched its school feeding programme in two of the most food-insecure districts of Sierra Leone, including Munjama’s village. Because of donations like yours, in the first year WFP reached more than 29,000 children with nutritious school meals, of whom over 14,000 were girls.

While the school meal itself is not designed to substitute home-cooked dishes, for many families like Munjama’s it becomes a lifeline as they would struggle otherwise to provide regular, nutritious food to their children. 

The meals also support healthy development in children, offering a regular source of nutrients that are essential for their mental and physical growth. Because of these meals, teachers are reporting an overall increase in attendance and improved performance of the children.

“Before school feeding, some of these children would only have one meal a day in the evening and keep a portion of that left over for the morning. Now the children have two meals a day and their attention has increased”

 says Augustine Fallay, deputy headteacher at Munjama's primary school

Thank you for choosing to support girls like Munjama. If you'd like to make sure even more children don't go hungry please donate today