Our nutrition program helps to fund school lunches at Chini School. The goal is to feed all the students from the school during lunch time every day. The menu includes beans and maize. Last year Health Amplifier helped to provide over 30,000 school lunches. Once a month we also promote a fruit day so the pupils are served with fruit to help to boost their health. It was also great to have some students from the UK to be their medical electives at Chini School in Kikavu. They worked hard to measure the height and weight of the school children so we will able to monitor their physical development. We are planning to have the same data collection next year for comparison and use the result to bring awareness in the community of the importance of having a healthy diet.
Lunch Project
The kids have lunch at the school every day, the meal is a mixed of beans and maize called makande, cooked in a wood stove at the school, as part of the nutrition program. At least once a month all the students have apart from the daily meal a fruit day. The chosen fruit depends on the availability at the markets and the season, but mainly is a banana as the Kilimanjaro region is known for the massive production of this fruit. From 2021 the aim is to have the fruit day once a week instead of once a month.
Height and Weight
During summer 2018, four medical electives students came to Kikavu to get fully involved on our projects. Faith Clare, Sebastian Brown, Alexandra Holdich and Alice Appleton recorded the anthropometric measurements of all the students. As part of the nutrition program in August of 2019, medical staff of the Kikavu Chini dispensary recorded again height and weight of the students to have a chart that allows us to compare the measurements and prove the importance of a healthy and consistent meal to avoid malnutrition and the consequences associated to it.
