In addition to providing preventative health care services for infants, toddlers and their mothers and treatment, and clean water for drinking, cooking, bathing, and washing for rural villagers lacking access to safe sources, Bread and Water for Africa® prioritizes proper nutrition, especially for growing children whose young bodies are so dependent on to lead, long healthy lives.

It is particularly true for the orphaned and abandoned children who live at the children’s homes and orphanage supported by Bread and Water for Africa® including the Lewa Children’s Home in Kenya, the Karen Baird Children’s Home in Sierra Leone, the Kabwata Orphanage, and Transit Centre in Zambia and the Lerato Children’s Village in Zimbabwe, as many of them arrive at their new homes severely malnourished.

Since our formation in 1997, agriculture has been, and remains today, among our top priorities for promoting food security for the children at the children’s homes as well as self-sufficiency through allowing for the sale of surplus produce and dairy products, such as through the creation of the Baraka Farm which provides food at support for the Lewa Children’s Home.

We strongly believe in the basic tenet that it is not simply enough to purchase food for a child to eat for a day or two or provide a family with a bag of rice which may provide sustenance for a week or two: Those are short-term solutions to a long-term, complex problem throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

The need today is as great as ever due to both climate change which is making weather conditions, such as drought and flooding, even more, drastic resulting in less and less crop production, while at the same time the COVID-19 pandemic is causing rampant inflation, particularly in the cost of basic food stuffs, especially in countries such as Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Thanks to our supporters from around the country, we are doing what we can to help alleviate those critical issues, such as by recently funding the construction of a greenhouse in Zambia which is providing fresh produce for the children at Kabwata.

And in addition to supporting food self-sufficiency for our partners who operate children’s homes, we also promote agriculture on both the very small scale by providing training and supplies to primarily women farmers who subsist on only what they can grow on their small tracts of land, as well as large scale operations which grow tons of rice on hundreds of acres providing food and employment for those in the communities they serve.

Such is the case in Sierra Leone where we provide support to our longtime partner there, Faith Healing Development Organization, which over the years has trained hundreds of female farmers in how to get the most out of their small tracts of land, as well as providing them seed stock, gardening tools, fertilizer and more to ensure bountiful harvests year-round.

Faith Healing Development Organization also operates a massive, large-scale farming operation which grows several tons of rice, the main staple food of the country, utilizing tractors and farm equipment shipped overseas by Bread and Water for Africa®.

For us, nothing puts smiles on our faces more than to see photographs of children with a big plate of ugali (cornmeal, a staple food of Kenya) and sukumi wiki (braised greens with onions and tomatoes), or a woman farmer in Sierra Leone proudly showing off a great big, just harvested, cassava root!