School Feeding Program

For children in poor households, chronic shortages of food means that children are sick more, they’re at risk for blindness and stunted growth, and they have trouble learning in school.  The TOUCH school feeding program provides two meals each day for students who do not have regular meals at home.

For $10, you can provide meals for one child for a month. By making your gift a monthly donation, you’ll help make it easier for us to plan nutritious meals, and you’ll make our feeding program more effective.

By providing meals at school, you’re doing all this, too:

• Improving children’s capacity to learn
• Lifting a burden from overwhelmed families
• Keeping children healthy
• Preventing blindness*
• Improving school attendance**
• Saving lives!***

Families in Kitintale do not earn enough to purchase food, and there is really no place here to grow it for themselves. They live in the maze-like slums with hard-packed soil and over 17,000 people all in the same situation. For the most kids at TOUCH, the meal they receive at school is the only meal they will have.

“First, you are poor at home. No bread, no tea. Nothing. Secondly, the school is poor. Now, what are you going to accomplish? Yesterday, I did not eat.” - Martin

At home, they will eat once every two to three days. This “meal” often consists of tea without milk, or thin porridge, with little nutritional value. The lack of nutrition shows up as sickness, lower grades, and absences from school. Some of the TOUCH kids are HIV positive, and proper nutrition is a life or death issue for them. They can’t keep their medicines down without food, and without food the medications’ side effects can be devastating.

Thank you for your life-giving donations! 

Read how one girl benefits from your gift of food…

* Vitamin A deficiency is the leading cause of blindness in children.
** Especially for younger children, who often come only for the food.
*** Hunger and malnutrition is the number one risk to health worldwide.