Through school feeding schemes, ForAfrika, the continent’s largest homegrown humanitarian organisation, provides a meal a day each school day to approximately 190 000 children across the continent. In Angola, the organisation provides 21 300 children with this life-saving service. The organisation has also set itself a target of reaching 60 000 children through its clinic-based nutrition programme, aimed at reversing severe malnutrition between 2022 and 2025.

Angola is experiencing its worst drought in 40 years. Africa has been plagued by drought this year that extends from the Horn of Africa across Central and Southern Africa, and is putting the lives of millions of people at risk. Food insecurity in Africa is driven by recurring environmental, political and economic instability, and a concomitant breakdown in community support systems.

While not having enough to eat is an all-too-visible sign of poverty, child poverty is multilayered. ForAfrika is hoping to deepen its working relationship with authorities in Angola so that it can support the country’s impressive child protection legislation, says Njinga.

Angola has made 11 legislated commitments to its children, bolstered by a package of legal instruments and public policies established in an attempt to promote and guarantee children’s rights to life, development, participation and protection. To enforce these rights and freedoms of children, birth registration has been universalised. [subs: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2018/05/committee-rights-child-considers-reports-angola]

A groundbreaking 2014 report by the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), titled Analysing Child Poverty and Deprivation in sub-Saharan Africa, showed that across 30 countries in the region, 247-million children suffered two or more deprivations crucial to their survival and development – with the most common being poor infant feeding and a lack of sanitation. Even worse, 78-million suffered four or more deprivations (commonly, lack of sanitation, lack of access to vaccinations, contaminated water and poor-quality education).

Since then, climate change has gained a firm grip on sub-Saharan Africa, and has become “a new player” in the forces that lead to poverty in the region, says Njinga.

“Parents are forced to abandon their children in search of food, and a lack of parenting puts children at risk of suffering neglect, abuse and violence. You see children as young as five begging on the street - and children, especially girls, are at risk of falling into prostitution to survive, and even of becoming victims of human trafficking,” he says.

In an attempt to protect Angola’s children from resorting to begging on urban streets, ForAfrika’s school feeding programmes in the country are all in the rural areas, says Einstein Santos, ForAfrika’s deputy country director for Angola.

“In the schools, we can see the change when we start a feeding programme. Attendance improves dramatically when we provide just one meal a day. In the clinics it is the same … The problem is huge. Our work has a positive impact on thousands of children, but we’re reaching a very small portion of Angola’s children. If we could, we would reach every one. We want a society where this does not happen. We want an Africa that thrives,” says Santos.

ForAfrika assisted more than 1.2-million people in South Sudan in 2021, and more than 903 000 in Angola, 50 000 in Uganda, 400 000 in Mozambique, 166 300 in South Africa and 500 in Rwanda in the same year. This assistance includes working with people to improve their ability to feed themselves.