Our 1,000 Food Baskets for 1,000 Families campaign was a great success. We exceeded our goal with support to 2,300 families this year! This campaign is a strong tradition at Child Foundation because we know that hunger causes children to fall out of school or diminishes their success in the classroom. Access to education requires access to nutritious meals.
That is why we identify and support children and their families in Iran, Afghanistan, and Indonesia in need of food aid during the month of Ramadan.
Thanks to the generous contributions of donors and efforts of our staff and partners, we’ve already delivered food packages to dozens of Indonesian families and more than 400 Afghan families. Another US-based organization, Comfort Aid International, has admired the work we do in Afghanistan and pitched in to help Afghan families in our program and many who are not. With that help, we distributed an additional 800 food packages to families facing hunger. About half of the food packages went to our sponsored families in Mazar-e Sharif and the other half were distributed to families in Bamyan, a remove village, and Sar-e Pol, a city heavily impacted by violence.
Donors have enabled us to give food baskets to approximately 1,000 Iranian families. Using sponsors’ contributions to their children in Iran, our partner was able to deliver double the amount of beans and lentils to each currently sponsored child for their families’ needs.
The urgency of food aid in Afghanistan and Iran
The World Food Program recently published a Hunger Hotspots report indicating few other countries in the world have more people facing acute hunger than Afghanistan. In Iran, in addition to the economic problems caused by the sanctions, the spread of the coronavirus has seriously added to the challenges. The closure of many stores, combined with fears and anxieties over the pandemic, led to rising food prices amidst difficult economic demands and unemployment. Make no mistake, food insecurity persists in Afghanistan and Iran—and it is an emergency we feel compelled to address.
Access to education is at the core of our mission and food security is an essential part of ensuring students have what they need to stay in school and thrive as individuals. Reflecting on the importance of our food assistance programs, Gary Gamer, Child Foundation’s President and CEO, stressed the connection between food and education.