Johannesburg – For many South African learners, the end of the academic year heralds the start of much-anticipated school holidays, with many looking forward to a well-deserved rest and spending the festive season with family and friends.
But for many others, the closure of academic institutions for the annual December holidays ushers in a period of food insecurity and chronic hunger.
Many learners from poor households rely on school nutrition programmes for their meals.
The governments National School Nutrition Programme (NSNP), under the Department of Basic Education (DBE), provides a critical lifeline for many of South Africas vulnerable learners.
For regular nutrition, more than nine million learners rely on the NSNP and its private sector partnerships such as the Tiger Brands Foundation (TBF) in-school Breakfast Programme.
However, school closure means that this support network becomes unavailable, leaving most learners from poor households without any food.
Millions going hungry
TBF Operations Manager Karl Muller said chronic hunger and food insecurity remain major challenges in South Africa.
Muller said about 30 million people half the countrys population – go to bed hungry, and an equal number run out of money for food every month.
The Childrens Institutes 2020 South African Child Gauge report reveals that one in four children under the age of five is stunted, which is a sign of chronic undernutrition. Unfortunately, these numbers have remained unchanged for 20 years, Muller said.
Hunger and obesity are two forms of malnutrition that often go together.
“This double burden of malnutrition creates unprecedented challenges for governments and civil society organisations tasked with running nutritional programmes to assist the most vulnerable communities.
Muller said there was little to suggest that any significant improvement in terms of food and nutrition security of children living in South Africa has been achieved over the past two decades.
“Evidence suggests that the situation is at best stagnant and could well be getting worse,” he said.
Tough economic conditions
Muller said the plight of poor households was further exacerbated by the rising costs of staple foods.
Milk, bread, and maize prices have been rising in recent times amid difficult economic conditions that include increasing inflation, and high-interest rates.
Muller said exploring ways to maintain good nutritional choices over the holiday period was crucial to mitigate the impact of hunger, with additional interventions to ensure learners have access to regular meals when schools are closed over the festive period.
Nutritious food should be the order of the day, which is why Tiger Brands Foundation annually distributes hampers during the December holiday period to help maintain the nutrition of learners in some of its beneficiary schools, said Muller.
This year, TBF will distribute more than 57 tonnes of food, in the form of over 5 700 food hampers to learners across all nine provinces.
Each hamper contains a little over 10kg of food items, including maize meal, flour, sugar, milk powder, cooking oil, oats, samp, and baked beans.
More than just breakfast
The bulk of these will be distributed in Gauteng, where 1 963 beneficiaries will receive hampers, followed by Limpopo with 696, the Free State with 570, and the Eastern Cape with 571, while 502 will be distributed in Mpumalanga, 425 in the Northern Cape, 389 in the Western Cape, 333 in the North West and 263 in KwaZulu-Natal.
Muller notes that the food hampers being distributed by the Foundation to learners and their families across South Africa include far more than the usual breakfast that is served as part of TBFs in-school nutrition Programme.
In fact, these hampers contain enough food to feed a family.
The distribution of hampers is a temporary measure to assist our most vulnerable learners and families to have ongoing access to nutritious food during the holiday period,” said Muller.
“Our normal in-school Breakfast Programme will resume as soon as schools reopen at the start of the new academic year.
The TBFs in-school Breakfast Programme now reaches 96 schools across all nine provinces in South Africa and feeds over 74 596 learners per day.
Last year in December, the foundation celebrated serving its 100th million in-school meals since the Programmes inception in 2011.
