Daily school meals
One hot plate, every school day, cooked on site by cooks from the same village.
How it worksGhana · Uganda · Kenya · Tanzania · Malawi
A hot meal costs
25 cents.
Not a dollar. Not five. Twenty-five cents puts maize, beans and greens in front of a kid who came to school hungry. Your $10 is forty of those meals, and we'll tell you which school they landed in.
Receipt emailed instantly · Cancel a monthly gift any time · No phone calls
4,900,000
meals served last school year
26,400
kids fed every single school day
25¢
cost of the food on one plate
91%
of your dollar goes to food and program
The problem, plainly
A hungry kid at 10 a.m. looks exactly like a kid who isn't trying.
That's the part most people miss. Hunger doesn't show up as a child collapsing in a classroom. It shows up as a child who drifts, who can't hold a sentence in their head, who does fine in the morning and badly after lunch — because there was no lunch. Teachers write it down as behavior. It's calories.
They showed up anyway
Most of the kids we feed walked to school on an empty stomach and will walk home to a house where dinner is uncertain. Showing up is the part they already did.
The fix is cheap and boring
One plate of maize, beans and greens, cooked on site, costs about a quarter. There's no technology to invent and no breakthrough to wait for.
Attendance follows food
When a school starts serving lunch, attendance in our districts climbs 11 to 19 points within two terms. It's the most reliable effect we've ever measured.
Four programs
Everything we do is food.
We're not a general-purpose charity that also happens to feed kids. Feeding kids is the entire organization, and these are the four ways we do it.
Take-home rations
School closes for the holidays; hunger doesn't. Families get grain to bridge the gap.
How it worksMalnutrition treatment
For kids already too thin, therapeutic food and weekly weigh-ins until they recover.
How it worksSchool gardens
Greens grown on school land, and grain bought from farmers in the same district.
How it worksWhere your money goes
Five steps, and you can audit every one.
Most people give and then hear nothing. We built the opposite: a short, dull, checkable chain from your card to a lunch tray, with a receipt at every link.
You give
Charged once, or on the same date each month. Receipt in your inbox within a minute.
We pool it
Gifts sit in a restricted account and are released as grants on the first of the month.
A local partner buys food
Eleven organizations, all registered where they work, all audited before their first grant.
Plates get counted
Kitchen logs, grain receipts and headcounts reviewed every quarter by our country leads.
You get the numbers
A quarterly email: meals served, what they cost, and anything that went wrong.
One kid
By ten in the morning I could not hear the teacher properly. Now we eat at one, and the afternoon is fine.Joseph, 11 — Gulu, Uganda
His teacher had him marked down as inattentive for two years. He was hungry.
Stretch it further
Three ways to make the same gift go further.
Your employer may double it
Thousands of American companies match employee donations dollar for dollar, and most of that money is never claimed. It takes about five minutes.
Check matchingMake it monthly
Grain costs about 19% less right after harvest. A kitchen that knows what's coming buys at the bottom of the curve, so the same dollars stretch further.
Give monthlyGet other people in
A 5K, a bake sale, or a birthday where you ask for donations instead of presents. We send a kit with everything you need.
Start a fundraiser$10 is forty meals. Right now.
Receipted instantly, and reported back to you with real numbers.