Helping primary schools in rural Tanzania to give nutritious meals to their pupils
We are taking the Breakfast Club Annual Charity Quiz online!
Use the link below to access the joining details.
https://www.facebook.com/events/3060073290738764
Look forward to seeing you there
If you cannot attend you can still support the Charity by visiting our Just giving page.
Please to say that we’ve added new pages to the site about the projects Breakfast Club Tanzania run, where we work and about why nutrition and education are linked.
We’ve also updated the About Us page.
With the introduction of the new school, we are delighted to announce that we have taken on two new staff to join the Breakfast Club Team.
Hidaya Ali is our new head cook. She is a 41 year old mother of 5 children, who attend Mtawanya school and lives in the local village. She has previously volunteered her time out of the goodness of her heart to feed at a different school. We felt that both her experience and positive attitude made her the perfect addition to our team. She is a hard worker and dedicated to our ethos of feeding children to provide them with a brighter future.
We have also taken on a delightful junior cook named Latifah. She is a 20 year old single mother of a little girl who attends the school. She is very pleased to have a job and is thrilled to have the opportunity to begin a career with Breakfast Club and the capacity to support her child.
The most exciting development of the past few months is that Breakfast Club Tanzania has implemented a project into a third school, Mtawanya Primary School!
Mtwanya was chosen after extensive research into the needs, location and poverty levels at schools in the area. The school has 280 pupils and is situated in a rural location outside of Mtwara town. We began feeding at the start of November and both the pupils and villagers are delighted with our arrival! Above are pictures taken on the first day, the children were so happy when we told them about our project they sang and danced in delight, it was a heart warming picture for Project Manager, Evie Davidson, whose hard work and commitment led to expanding the feeding programme.
We are most thankful to Chumvini Prison who have agreed to help us with transport for delivering the ‘uji’ dry mix and the sugar to the schools. This will be a huge help in the wet season when the roads are impassable. A special thanks to Mr Kasambula at the prison for his support via their community aid scheme.
We celebrated our fourth birthday this year and we have some truly impressive accomplishments under our belt. It has been a particularly exciting past 6 months and we have exceeded even our own expectations by completing another building project, taking on more Tanzanian staff and most excitingly, implementing another feeding programme into a third school.
We now feed 1050 children daily!!!
In May, Katy (Programme Director) worked with local artist, Anthony (pictured below) to create a selection of artwork and jewellery for the Africa Oye festival in Liverpool. Anthony is famous locally for his tinga tinga style artwork (see right). All of the art was kindly bought directly from Anthony by one of our trustees John Childs. Therefore 100% of the sales went directly to the charity. Despite the terrible weather, we managed to make £300 and publicised Breakfast Club’s work to hundreds of shivering Liverpudlians. If you are interested in this style of art Tinga Tinga painting please get in touch, as we are able to take orders from Anthony.
Wahab Issae has been extremely helpful and insightful regarding the problem of hunger amongst school children and how we can help combat this. From the beginning he has been very enthusiastic about the Breakfast Club, and has been involved in much of our research. In the past he has worked with researchers from Oxford and Harvard Universities and is highly qualified in food nutrition.
Below is the transcript of the interview between Wahab and Rob:
Question: Wahab, what do you believe are the main benefits of the work that Breakfast Club is doing at Mangamba Primary School?
Answer: Well, first and foremost I feel that providing food at school will have an extremely positive impact on the level of attendance at school. My previous research points to the fact that fewer than 20% of school children in the Mtwara region receive food before school. Providing food at school will also increase parental encouragement to attend.
I also feel that giving children food at school will increase their attention rates in class, leading to a greater understanding of what is being taught. However, this relies upon the food being of a high nutritional content, which I know is true of the food that you are providing.
Question: We provide an uji porridge made up of millet, rice, dona (a highly nutritious type of maize), sugar and milk, what impact do you think this is having on the general health of the children?
Answer: I would say that the food provided is improving the health of the children. They will be more resistant to diseases and should grow at an increased rate.
Question: We have some ideas concerning the future of this project and other projects of this nature, for example planting fruit trees at the school or providing bees nests. How else do you think we can ensure long-term sustainability?
Answer: In principal this is a good idea but you would need numerous nests to be completely self-reliant. However, bee’s nests and trees are a good idea because children can learn some useful skills at school which will benefit them later in life. The children can plant and maintain the trees and be taught beekeeping as part of their stadi za kazi (study of work) classes. In the Arusha declaration of 1967 Julius Nyerere, “the father of the nation” (Tanzania’s first independent leader), proclaimed that “education for self-reliance” is a means by which Tanzania can reduce its dependency on imports and external support and this element of your project fits into these goals. Nyerere declared it crucial that children are able to put into practice in society what they learn in school.
Question: One of our original aims was complete self-sufficiency in the long-term, can you think of any other ways we can help to increase self-reliance at the school?
Answer: If your ideas with fruit and honey are a success the only other elements of the project you need to consider are the milk and the uji mixture. It may be possible to buy cows so that the children can rear them and to ask parents to provide the bulk of the uji mixture. Since you are now using more of the very cheap but highly nutritious dona in the mix, it may be possible to use this as the main ingredient in the mixture.
Breakfast Club Tanzania would like to thank Rob Ahearne for the last six months. Having arrived off the plane clean-shaven, pale and speaking no Swahili, he returns to the UK a bearded, tanned, Swahili speaker! Rob has done a fantastic job managing and moving forward the project since the original set up and has built excellent relationships between the Breakfast Club, local government officials, school teachers and the cooks. He will be greatly missed!
In his last few weeks here, during the June school holidays, Rob handed over the project to Romy Campbell (pictured). Romy has previously worked in the area and speaks excellent Swahili. We are all extremely happy to welcome Romy to Tanzania and believe she will be a real asset to The Breakfast Club team.
Our progress…
May was our first full calendar month at Mangamba Primary School and was a great success. Attendance records from the start to the end of the month increased by around 10-15%. Generally, the attendance records of the younger children have increased more dramatically, particularly heartening since it is the younger children who will benefit from the project for the majority of their school life. We hope that this is a trend that will remain, since our commitment to the school is long-term.
“The students do not eat any breakfast. Their parents cannot afford it; they are all small-scale farmers near here. This is a problem”
Mr Mkoni, Head of Mangamba Primary.
Mangamba is situated in the rural part of the Mtwara district and is one of the smallest Primary Schools in the area with around 247 children. Most of the families are subsistence farmers, living on around 60 pence per day.
Following our initial research we decided to support Mangamba School and held a Parent Teacher Meeting at the end of February. Over 100 people came to discuss the logistics of the Feeding Programme. All parents agreed that each family should try to contribute a small amount per month to the project. This is a nominal amount and we do not expect all families to be able to pay, however it is important for parents to feel part of the project.
Rob Ahearne (Project Manager) has been working closely with the school in the run up to the feeding. He has built strong working relationships with the teachers, villagers, millers and market sellers. In addition he is now able to converse with all parties in Swahili. This is a great achievement in such a short time, and essential to the efficacy of the project.
We have also employed Ally Masudi as part time local advisor. He has been helping us translate documents and ensures that the community surrounding the school also benefit from the School Feeding Programmes. Breakfast Club therefore uses only local produce, expertise and labour in order to support the local economy.
For example, by:
• Providing employment to 2 local women to cook the uji (porridge)
• Providing income for local farmers- 25 litres of milk per day
• Providing income to local millers – Breakfast Club pays for the milling of 100 kg of millet, rice and maize every other week
• Providing part time employment for a driver to deliver the food to the school
Breakfast Club Tanzania are delighted to announce to our donors that the School Feeding Programme started at Mangamba School on the 16th April. It was an important and exciting day for Rob Ahearne (Project Manager) and Katy Davies (Programme Director) to see every child at Mangamba Primary School receive their bowl of nutritious uji (porridge) and fruit. We would like to thank everyone for your kind donations, which have allowed us to start the project, your continuing support will allow the project to develop. Please spread word to family, friends and colleagues about our work so that our support base can expand and we can incorporate more schools. If you have any ideas for fundraising events or you would like to organise something yourself please contact us on breakfastclubtanzania@gmail.com