Margeret Dempsey, a secondary school teacher from Kildare, is the founder of the Ndiini School Food Programme, which provides lunch for approximately 600 students at the primary school in Kenya every day.

“I travelled to Kenya in 2011 to volunteer and I was placed in Ndiini primary school, about a 20-minute drive outside Nairobi.

“During my time there, I noticed that the children never had lunch. It wasn’t a famine, but most were surviving on just one meal a day and they were exhausted due to the lack of adequate nutrition.

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“They were falling asleep in class, skipping school and generally struggling to last the day. Many were dropping out due to hunger and heading to the city to beg for food,” she says.

When Margaret returned from Kenya, she knew she had to do something.

“I couldn’t come home knowing my impact in Ndiini was minimal. I organised pub quizzes, ran marathons and asked friends and family to donate to help raise funds. I then officially registered the Ndiini School Food Programme as an Irish charity in January 2012,” she says.

The programme now provides a simple but nutritious meal of beans and rice to the students of Ndiini primary school on a daily basis. Now in its fourth year, the programme is motivating these children to stay in school and student attendance stands at almost 100%. The cost of providing one student with food for a year works out at approximately €28.

“At the moment, there are 800 students aged between two and 14 in the school, out of which 600 get fed every day by the programme. The local church provides porridge for the very young ones. Education is the only way to escape poverty in Africa and these kids need a chance beyond primary school. If they can spell and have basic maths their chances in life are much better,” says Margaret.

Since the programme began, students are now motivated and alert. Parents and teachers have come on board and planted a vegetable garden to help supplement the food provided.

“It is important that they don’t just see me handing out money to them. The community needs to get involved to make this sustainable. We came to the agreement that the parents will pay for the cook and the firewood for cooking from now on.

“At the moment, the cook gets €25 a week. In Kenya that’s a fair amount, and it’s a double incentive for this woman because she is a single mum and her little boy attends the school.”

Margaret also has a coordinator in Kenya who she sends the money to for purchasing food, while she travels to Kenya two to three times a year to make sure everything is running smoothly and the accounts are all above board.

She would like to see the charity expand and is currently in discussion with Mary’s Meals – an international charity that provides lunches in the schools of the world’s poorest communities.

“I don’t get out to Kenya as often as I would like, so I’m hoping they can take me under their wing. They can get the community involved on a much bigger scale.”

The main goal of the Ndiini School Food Programme is to ensure that all students receive lunch during the school term. Long-term aims include improving school attendance, increasing community involvement through tending the vegetable garden, developing a library and establishing a scholarship fund for secondary school. An annual fundraiser for the charity takes place on 16 October – World Food Day. People are being asked to donate part of their lunch by texting LUNCH to 50300 to donate €2. You can also visit www.nsfood.org

“This year I hope to get 5,000 people to donate just €2. That would be €10,000, which is how much it costs to feed these children for a whole year. We need to raise that much every year if we want to continue, so we really need your help,” says Margaret.