International Day of Families 2024
On Wednesday 15th May we will be celebrating International Day of Families. International Day of Families was created by the UN in 1993...
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The Feeding Programme
Our Feeding Programme provides food for children and their families living in the slums of Kampala who are living in food poverty - improving nutrition and health, and reducing economic pressure for families.
The Feeding Projects began in 2011, as part of our free, daily education classes for children between 3-6 years old in three slum communities. We noticed that a significant number of children were undernourished and regularly unwell, and found that many children were unable to join in with our lessons, games and other activities due to fatigue from lack of food. Most of the children were surviving on one meal per day.
Our team in Uganda decided to start offering free nutritious meals after class, alongside a nutritious snack which was provided 3 days a week. We now provide free meals a minimum of twice a week for up to 100 children in 3 of Kampala's poorest slums - Katanga, Namuwongo and Naguru.
What we do
The Feeding Project supports communities in the slums in two ways: feeding children nutritious daily meals and providing food packages to vulnerable families.
We first launched our food banks in the onset of lockdown in 2020, when many families completely lost their income overnight. These food parcels contain enough nutritious local produce to make 100 meals. To date, we have given out:
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4.5 million food parcels to 32,498 households
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45 million meals to children and families, preventing thousands of people from going hungry.
Our meals provide proper nutrition to vulnerable children improving their general health, their ability to fight off disease and illness, increase their concentration, behaviour skills and progress in learning.
The context
At least 9 million Ugandans are food insecure and over one third of children living in Uganda are malnourished (UNICEF, 2022).
People living in the slums of Kampala rely overwhelmingly on low paid, informal and unskilled labour, and with the onset of pandemic lockdowns, opportunities for this work vanished for months at a time.
Although the lockdowns have now ended, the economic impacts haven’t. Recently food prices have vastly increased (a meal that cost 20p in 2020 now costs £1), with the greatest impact on the most vulnerable.
Families often don’t know where their next meal is coming from.
Our Impact
Since 2011 we have provided 45 million meals to hungry and vulnerable families and children. We have provided these meals via our food banks and the daily meal given to each child when they attend our Educating Project.
Preventing hunger with each meal is our short term impact. When a child receives a meal or a snack it is a consequence of them attending our other projects, meaning they are being either Educated, Protected, or Skilled. The longer term impact of these meals is that they have the energy to attend educational classes, are kept safe from risk and develop skills that allow them to financially lift themselves out of poverty.
Annie's Story
Annie used to struggle without any food in her house or the money to buy it. We helped her by bringing her food and soap. She started cooking straight away!
“I am very grateful to Kids Club Kampala. Every time I receive a food parcel it is a miracle. I do not have any money to buy food. Today, I had not planned on eating. I am overjoyed with the food parcel. Thank you”
We believe every child should have healthy, nutritious food and every parent should know where their next meal is coming from.
You can help us reach more parents like Annie.
What next?
At Kids Club Kampala we’re committed to ensuring that our projects create empowering and sustainable transformations in the lives of those we support.
In 2022, to assess the effectiveness of our projects, we commissioned Vashi Impact Group (VIG) to undertake a comprehensive independent evaluation of our projects outcomes. The evaluation was designed to measure our impact against three specific OECD DAC Network on Development Evaluation (DAC) criteria: impact, coherence, and sustainability. We were particularly interested in gaining insights into the strengths and weaknesses of our project areas and individual initiatives. The aim for us is to learn where we could refine and enhance our strategies for the long-term betterment of the communities we support.
What did we find out about our feeding project?
The feeding project is one of our larger initiatives and we should continue driving this forward. We aim to map out other local efforts and NGOs to build scope for collaboration. These collaborations would be essential in supporting our efforts to tackle food insecurity in the project regions as well as expanding outreach to other areas.
We’re also going to work to potentially shift focus to address the root causes of food insecurity present in our communities and continue to focus on providing meals to those that are extremely vulnerable. We’re going to continue to drive the process of embedding our practices into broad(er) civil society frameworks at the local, country or regional-level in order to sustain progress and results over-time beyond the limited duration of our funded projects. For this, we aim to bolster the leadership of local partners, and integrate their understanding of the context, political dynamics and their networks.
The Kids Club Kampala Way
Why we’re different
Our Feeding Programme is part of the way we are uniquely supporting children in Kampala slums survive and thrive.
At Kids Club Kampala, we believe that every child is unique, special and deserves to have the opportunity to reach their full potential. Our work is based on a holistic approach, where we focus on meeting the immediate needs of children and families in the slums while empowering them to bring about long-term, sustainable changes in their lives. Our approach encompasses four core project areas: feeding, protecting, educating, and skilling.
These four areas are not siloed; they work together holistically to create a supportive environment for vulnerable children and their families. We firmly believe in a holistic approach, ensuring that children and families have their basic needs met (food, safety) so they can fully engage with and benefit from education and skills development. This approach helps them move from merely surviving to truly thriving, as stated in our theory of change.
Read more about our work
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