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Ethiopia

Breakfast Club Programme

Our Breakfast Club programme provides nutritious breakfast to children attending schools in the most deprived areas of Ethiopia. Since 2021 we support 90 children every year from poor families who go to school hungry because their families could not afford breakfast.

Children would often skip school and those who still came to school hungry, collapsed in class because they often travelled long distance (2 hours or more) by foot. The situation become so bad that some teachers began to contribute their monthly salary to a feeding programme at a local cafe to provide breakfast to children.

‘Most children in the school are from low-income families, many students are malnourished  and this resulted in high school drop-outs. The Breakfast Club brought positive change in the well-being of children, especially their health with many suffering from anaemia making massive improvement. Children education performance also showed significant improvement.’ Mr Gobez, school principal at Basso School who benefited from our Breakfast Club programme.

Through this programme, children are provided with a nutritious meal prepared with fresh ingredients, whilst their parents or guardians receive training and start-up capital to start a business. Schools teachers also receive training in promoting healthy eating practices to parents to reduce malnutrition.

Why eating breakfast is important

‘The breakfast club gives me energy to be able to stay awake and strong in class. I am more active and I learn better.’

Research has shown that children who skip breakfast perform less well academically, socially and emotionally than those who eat breakfast. A recent Eating Breakfast  report by Health4Schools demonstrate that breakfast consumption in children has positive effects on their cognitive function particularly memory, attention, and executive function up to 4 hours after consumption. Daily breakfast consumption also positively improves academic performance so that children who eat breakfast regularly have better school grades and increase on-task behaviour in class.

Meet Dagmawet Tetk a student at Basso school. She benefited from our Breakfast Club programme last year and saw a massive improvement in her academic results. Before taking part in the programme she was constantly weak and unable to focus in class. She made significant progress from eating breakfast every morning and as her energy and strength increased her academic performance also increased.

This programme is more than a feeding programme, our model is designed to also support parents or guardians by training them to start a small business so that they can feed their children and pay for school materials. This model makes our programme sustainable after one year and self run without additional monetary support. This enables us to support a different school each academic year and reach more children in the poorest rural communities in Ethiopia.

Dagmawet mum’s Mulu also benefited from the programme with £56 seed money she received to start her chicken business after completing her business training. Mulu sells 40 eggs from her hen each day and hopes to expand her business to raising sheep.

This academic year we are supporting children from Chole Primary School  in Debre Birhan. The school is in the poorest region of Ethiopia and is now surrounded by Internally Displaced Camps as a result of the war in Tigray. This has led to an additional 112 students enrolled this academic year putting a strain in the limited resources of the school.

If you would like to support children in our Breakfast Club programme, please DONATE HERE