Nutrition Programme

In 2003, Malilangwe established the “Child Supplementary Feeding Scheme”, in conjunction with beneficiary communities, and aligned with Zimbabwe’s Ministries of Health & Child Welfare and Education.

Our feeding scheme was initially designed to provide a fully balanced meal every school day to children under five years old at satellite meal sites and children under the age of 12 years at selected schools. In the earlier years of the project, the children were served a corn-soya blend porridge called Nhapitapi.

In 2019, we wanted to broaden our reach to children in our surrounding communities and we substituted corn-soya porridge, previously distributed to 400 sites, with mahewu (a highly nutritious drink). Mahewu is currently distributed to 32 schools and four children’s homes. The revised project, “Nutrition Programme” serves less sites, but we have expanded our outreach to +21,000 children per school day.

Our Nutrition Programme works hand-in-hand with Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Health and Child Welfare to ensure that all schools where mahewu is distributed have potable water (which is required to mix the drink) and appropriately trained personnel to administer the project.

At some sites, we’ve addressed water hygiene standards through infrastructural changes, which assures quality control. We’ve also refurbished storerooms at each school which are used for storage and to make up the mahewu every day.

We employ 32 people in the local communities to be custodians of the Nutrition Programme. Their responsibility is to make up and serve 300ml of mahewu to every child at school, and they have all trained in food handling and preparation, health and safety.

We conduct monthly post-distribution monitoring visits to supervise food preparation, observe patterns of mahewu consumption, capture nutrition records, and check on the cleanliness of utensils and storage facilities, for example. In addition, the Ministry of Health and Child Welfare also conducts visits to each of the sites