TAFIKA FEEDING PROJECT
This collaborative project starts with Tafika, an amazing Volunteer Youth Group in northern Malawi. In Malawi many families don't have enough food and often children go to school without having eaten. This makes it difficult for them to concentrate and learn. Tafika recognised this and teamed up with Nourishing Minds to tackle the problem. Their solution was to ask the Head Man of the village to give up some land, Tafika organised the community to prepare the land, Nourishing Minds provided the maize and soya seed along with fertilizer and the community grew the crops, milled them, cooked them and fed their children every day at school. Seven communities now benefit from this project.
This blueprint was picked up on by Marys Meals who feed nearly 1.8m children each day worldwide. Mary's Meals agreed to fund a further 10 communities for 4 planting cycles adding in funding for temporary cook shelters, cooking equipment and bringing additional nutrition in the form of sweet potato to all 17 communities. Additionally, Marys Meals wanted to see if the project could become self sustaining and introduced cassava as a cash crop designed to help pay for ongoing costs.
Formidable Joy recognised the potential and also identified that not all communities had access to clean water so agreed to repair existing boreholes and drill new ones so communities could cook with clean water.
Classrooms for Malawi could see one of the communities was lacking physical classrooms and agreed to solve this issue for them.
Harvest Plus were also inspired and agree to bring their bio fortified seed to these communities, strengthening the yield and the nutritional value of what is grown.
Ripple Africa were contacted to provide help and support along with vines for the Sweet Potato crop.
Bananabox Trust have been instrumental in providing a way to move donated goods from the UK to Tafika in Malawi.
ZMCP have acted as a Management Consultancy for the project, bringing the partners together, sorting the paperwork and building a collaborative framework that allows the communities to gain a more holistic approach to their issues.
At February 2024, 10 communities are now feeding their children and over 1 million meals have been provided. The project is now working through a plan to become truly self sustaining so no foreign cash or inputs are required at all. This medium term goal is community driven.
ZMCP also act as a conduit for Tafika to gather funds for shipping pre-loved sports equipment to the over 200 football, netball and volleyball teams they have in their sports academy. All the funds raised are used to pay for shipping through our partners BananaBoxtrust.org. If you'd like to help please use the button to donate.
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