At House of Mercy Children’s Home, Lagos, Nigeria (HOM), we strive to ensure that no child in our community goes to bed hungry due to lack of sufficient, safe and nutritious food.
Ensuring food security is a national priority, particularly for young children, because not only does it impact on their present health and well-being but also their future health. Malnourished and improperly-fed children have a compromised immune system and do not develop and grow as well as others.
Since the launch of our Mobile Kitchen Programme eleven years ago, we have provided over 140,000 highly nutritious and life-saving meals to child beggars, street children, child scavengers and other needy and vulnerable children and distributed grocery items to over 900 destitute families in Lagos State, Oyo State and Ogun State.
Nothing is more uplifting than seeing the smiling face of a hungry child receiving a nutritious meal. Within the limits of available resources, we package and distribute highly nutritious and life-saving meals to starving and malnourished children every week through our Meals-on-Wheels programme.
An integral part of our Mobile Kitchen Programme is the distribution of packaged drinking water to children. Access to clean water for hygiene and sanitation is something many take for granted but for vulnerable children, a lack of access to safe and clean water for drinking and hygiene purposes exposes them to preventable waterborne diseases often with lethal consequences. It is estimated that one in every six people in the world is denied the right to clean, accessible and affordable water.
To commemorate the 2015 World Food Day on October 16, a global day to increase awareness, understanding and action to alleviate hunger, we prepared a video featuring our free food distribution programme and our sustainable farming project. The video is available on our YouTube channel.
Videos of our Child Feeding Programme can be viewed in our video gallery and also on our YouTube channel
“Hunger is not an issue of charity. It is an issue of justice.” ~ Jacques Diouf