Providing school lunches to kids in Mozambique

Greetings from Mozambique!

Over the last several months, our team has been working hard to serve school lunches to 2,000 chilren every day across eight primary schools in rural Mozambique. A key part of our program is to incorporate fresh, highly-nutritious ingredients produced by local farmer groups. Right now, this includes beans, carrots, tomatoes, kale, and beets from the farmers fields. 

Just a couple of months ago, we also kicked off a partnership with Higest, a chicken inputs company in Mozambique, which agreed to support the start-up of a chicken-egg cooperative in one of our villages. The Higest professionals trained a group of four farmers (three women) and donated 208 laying hens, the equipment, and enough chicken feed for the group's first month of production. The cooperative is now producing about 200 eggs every day, which MSLI is buying and integrating directly into our school lunch program for added nutrition. Eggs have one of the most digestible forms for protein, and the kids love them! For us, this project has been a sustainable way to increase access to nutritious foods for the kids, while also benefiting the local farmers who are now earning an income by selling eggs.

This has been a big hit amongst the kids, many of whom don't get to eat eggs at home. Some of the kids even ask the cooks to give them the boiled egg before peeling it, because they like to peel it themselves! We continue to look for more opportunities to improve children's nutrition, based on local recipes, and by sourcing food from local farmers. We believe this holistic approach delivers the most impact for the community.

As always, our work is driven by our passion to improve children’s nutrition and education, and to ultimately create opportunities for kids to succeed. Thank you for being part of our collective effort!