Milky Gari is a nutritious meal based on our enriched milk powder and locally grown cassava. International relief and recovery organisation ZOA provides this meal to school-going children. This is an additional reason for parents to send their children to school. This has resulted in a 21.7% increase in the number of children attending school, with nearly 2000 children in participating schools by the end of 2022.
Local community
The project makes a significant contribution to the development of the local community. By creating market links between local farmers and processing companies to provide schoolchildren with a nutritious meal. Local farmers supply cassava to women-led processing plants and receive training to increase their yields.
The local population has gained new knowledge in the field of hygiene, health, agriculture and nutrition. Also, microcredit schemes have been started to create more access to finance. This enabled us to sustainably complete the Home-Grown School Meals project together with ZOA on 31 December 2022.
Clean drinking water
For the consumption of milk powder, it is important that our end users have access to clean drinking water. That is why we have been working with Made Blue since 2015. We want to make drinking water available where it is most needed, so we have made 1.5 billion litres of water available in Ethiopia in recent years.
Infrastructure
Made Blue provides water points, such as toilets and washing facilities at a school, to name an example. A group of people have been trained to maintain the drinking water infrastructure. Coaches have also been trained to encourage people to change their hygiene behaviour. Our aim is to further expand this collaboration by also supplying our milk powder to these sites.