Every school day, 6,500 children across nine schools in Tarime sit down to a cup of maize porridge before class. Since the program began, that is 8.8 million breakfasts.
Breakfast at a Care for Africa school in Tarime.
Children in Tarime walk a long way to school. Many leave home without eating, and do not eat again until they get back in the evening.
A child who arrives that hungry is not failing because they are not trying. They fall asleep at the desk. They cannot hold a lesson in their head for a full hour. The teachers can see it happening in front of them and there is nothing they can do about it from the front of a classroom.
Breakfast is the simplest thing we do in Tarime. It is also the thing that makes the rest of it work.
The need is very big. In the area where we are doing the breakfast program there are still a number of schools that do not have it yet. They cry for us to include them. Our goal is to reach them.
In 2016 we put a water bore into Mtana, a government school in Tarime. Attendance rose almost straight away, because the girls who had been walking hours for water could be in a classroom instead.
Then the teachers told us what was happening next. The children were turning up, and they were turning up hungry.
So breakfast started at Mtana, for the same reason everything starts here. Somebody on the ground said what was needed, and we listened.
Care for Africa does three of them. Tarime does the other three.
That split matters more than it looks. This is not a delivery. Parents who pay a cook every week and students who carry the wood in every morning are running a breakfast program at their own school, and they treat it like one. It is theirs. That is why it holds.
Mtana was one of the lowest-performing schools in the district when we started. Within a year of the children eating before class, it was one of the better-performing ones.
Nothing else about that school changed. Same teachers, same classrooms, same long walk to get there. The only difference was that the children were not hungry.
Two students having breakfast before school in Tarime.
The program runs in nine schools and feeds 6,500 children every school day. Abdallah still hears from the schools it has not reached.
A breakfast is not complicated and it is not expensive. It is just the thing that has to happen first.
If your club, school or workplace would like to fund a class for a year, that is $2,000. Get in touch and we will tell you which school it goes to.
