Mary’s Meals has raised almost £6.5 million ($9 million) to feed children in Liberia, where the pandemic has made a poverty crisis worse.
Mary’s Meals, formerly known as Scottish International Relief, is an internationally registered charity. Their goal is setting up school meal programs in communities which ordinarily cannot afford them, especially in undeveloped countries. The charity was founded in 2002, when it fed 200 school children in Malawi. Today, it provides free school meals for over a million children daily.
Despite being named for Mary, mother of Jesus, the charity is not officially a religious organization.
In a fundraiser that began in Fall 2020, Mary’s Meals appealed to philanthropists for large donations on behalf of their new program in Liberia, where nearly 40 percent of the population is food insecure and 25 percent do not have regular access to sanitary drinking water.
According to UNICEF, a third of children in Liberia are malnourished enough to affect their growth, and 6 percent actively starving. Approximately 4 percent of school age children in Liberia are orphaned due to the ongoing AIDS crisis in the country.
The donations taken in by Mary’s Meals, which includes $2 million in matching funds from the UK Government,will provide daily meals for 43,000 school children. The charity claims that they can feed a child for a whole school year for just under £16 by sourcing locally grown food, which also helps enrich the economy these children will grow to join.
“Before Mary’s Meals came here there was no food for us to eat,” testified Magirl, a 13-year-old-girl from Gbatala in Liberia who plans to study to become a nurse.
“When Mary’s Meals came we were happy to pay attention to the lesson and listen to the teacher. We used to be hungry and didn’t learn anything in class because of the hunger – now we learn at school.”
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