Tackling Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa
The Food for Life project enables Scouts to help their families and communities achieve household food security by growing their own food in home and commercial gardens, predominantly in countries in Africa.
Donate monthly to Food for Life to provide long-term support tackle food insecurity and feed hungry Scouts and their families.
Food for Life has been developed as a response by Scouts to the food crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa. The food supply is inadequate and constantly challenged by a range of natural and man-made issues such as water and land shortages, poverty, political instability. Families simply do not have enough food to eat and whole communities are severely undernourished, currently a staggering 21% of the population in Africa. Weather patterns have also changed over time as a result of climate change, which means that it’s vital that communities not only learn to grow their own food, but that they also understand which seasonal crops to plant for successful harvests.
Through the Food for Life project, young people are equipped with skills in agriculture, entrepreneurship and business to enable them to contribute to reducing the gap in food production to feed their hungry families and communities. Concretely, Scouts are trained in community agriculture, provided the necessary tools and skills to plant and tend home and community gardens, and produce enough food to serve as a source of income generation. The project also promotes teamwork and community spirit, with Scouts and others coming together to work for a common goal, caring for their community gardens.
Food for Life is active in Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Tanzania, Togo, Niger, South Africa, South Sudan and Uganda, but there is scope to deliver this phenomenal Scout project in other countries and regions challenged by food insecurity.
Your monthly donation to Food for Life will be used to run all of the agricultural and entrepreneurship training at national and local levels, agricultural tools (e.g. watering cans, rakes, hoes), manure and materials to set up the model gardens, etc., so that the project can be rolled out in thousands of communities in Africa and further afield.