Vegan Compassion Group

School Feeding Programme - Shivashakti School in Dhanura VDC in Dang, Nepal

We have now completed a second school-feeding programme that we began in September 2018 at a remote mountain village school in Dang, Nepal.

We fed roughly 40 children from the nursery classes of a government school with multi-grain pudding and fruits. The children received their daily meal six days per week during the eight-month-long school year. A school report on the programme stated that ‘all students are of low socio-economic status and for many the school lunches are the only meal they receive other than a small family evening dinner’.

Although there have been some recent improvements, Nepal still has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the world. A 2016 report classified about 41% of Nepalese children under five as stunted, 11 per cent as wasted, and 29 per cent as underweight.

The project is one of three school feeding programmes operated in Nepalese schools by Grassroots Movement in Nepal (GMIN).

For 2019-20, a US based organisation was able to provide extra funds, allowing all children at the school to benefit from the programme. Our funding was no longer required. But we are happy to have helped to get the scheme off the ground and that more children will now be freed from hunger.

Funds and suitable programmes permitting, we hope to work with GMIN again in the future.

Effectiveness

An end of school year report gave the following assessment:

‘In addition to providing healthy, vegan lunches to young students, the school lunch program continues to have several secondary benefits including:

Increased school attendance rate & thus better educated students – students are more likely to attend school and stay the full day because families know a meal will be served
Creating a new job – job security for the cooks. The cooks are women and this income source provides them an opportunity to gain some financial independence and contribute to the financial care of their families
Supporting local (non-animal based) economy by supporting local produce farmers – legumes, rice, and vegetables are purchased from local or neighbouring village produce farmers
Saving animals’ lives – zero animals are slaughtered or used for their milk to feed the children.’