Refugees in Nakivale live off monthly food rations of rice, beans and posho. In October, when I naively asked a friend in Nakivale what she did when her 12 kilos of rice ran out, she laughed and stated the obvious, “you don’t eat”. Since then, in the light of COVID-19, the World Food Programme has had its funding slashed. The real life repercussion of this budget cut is that those refugees who were struggling to live off their original food allowance have had their food rations cut in half. That’s now 6 kilos of rice to last a month. I estimate that as about 12 plates of food.
Hello World is about to provide 100 households surrounding the 8 Hello Hubs with posho and beans in Nakivale.This will cost around £300. There are 110,000 mouths to feed in the settlement. We have nowhere near enough funding to help as many as need it over the 3 upcoming weeks of lockdown for Uganda. With no more budget, children are going to go hungry and hopes of learning at a Hello Hub are overshadowed by a struggle to survive. Hungry children are deeply vulnerable, at risk of trading sex for food, early marriage and abandonment.
Don’t read this as another grim statistic of COVID19, read this as if your friend had messaged you saying she was hungry and didn’t know where her next meal would come from. Right now, our friends are using the wifi at the Hello Hubs in Nakivale Refugee Settlement to send us these exact messages.
Many of us simply have no idea what it feels like to be truly hungry, or how it must feel to not have food to give your child. Please help us to feed more families in Nakivale. For £100, you would buy a meal for over 260 people. Imagine the impact.
