I recently asked Vineet Bhatnagar, founder of Shine Reading Academy, about the cost of school lunch for 2013. As many of you probably already know, one of our goals is to assist Vineet with feeding the 160 students attending his school daily.
Here’s his response:
The cost of the feeding program has increased significantly since last year for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the Zambian Ministry of Education stopped distributing maize meal and beans to schools in Lusaka, including ours. To date, I don’t really know why. As soon as the government took over the distribution of World Food Programme food from WorldVision, the flow of food became erratic and then stopped. So, we’re having to buy the maize meal ourselves.
On top of that, the cost of charcoal has increased by about 50% and we’ve expanded the school from 110 to 160 pupils.
So the new figures (in USD) are:-
Cost to feed the school (160 pupils) for 1 year = $2,795
Cost to feed the school for 1 month = $315
Cost to feed the school for 1 day = $14.33
A to Z is committed to the continued support of Shine Reading Academy. It is a successful school, educating the most vulnerable children in the area, and making a dramatic impact on the lives of the students attending classes. These resislient children need to be nourished in both mind and body.
We hope you will consider attending our annual fundraiser on February 23rd to help us meet one of our goals – to provide funds for three months of school lunch.