Food in Africa

About 1 billion people live in Africa. That figure looks like this: 1,000,000,000

Arrange your desks like this and imagine that your class is ‘Africa’.

If there are 30 of you, each pupil represents about 34 million Africans.

Four tables of pupils have to work on their land and grow most of the food that they eat, rather than being able to buy it.

Three tables have less than 60p a day to pay for medicine, clothes, food and anything else.

Two tables are underweight and are always short of food, eating about one meal a day.

We are now going to find out about a family who lives in Uganda. Roughly where the bowl is on this table.

Jane Apolot and her family live in these houses in Uganda. They rely on their land for food. A few years ago, they used to have very bad harvests and struggled to grow anything at all. They also had to live on less than 60p a day.

They now have more than enough crops from their harvests and earn money selling food at the local market. That’s because they were helped by the charity Send a Cow.

The family were given a cow, shown how to look after it and trained in new ways of growing food.

They now work together to grow lots of fruit and vegetables, using the cow manure as compost. This plot is growing pineapples.

The children look after their own crops too – like these passion fruit vines.

They use their new training to build things like this ‘Bag garden’, which grows more food when crops in the ground would struggle to survive.

Crops can be stored, like these millet seeds, beans and peanuts. This means that they can always eat three meals a day, so harvest lasts all year long!

The family have used the money from selling milk from the cow to buy some chickens. This gives them more food and also money when they sell eggs.

They can now harvest… and more!

The family has a future full of hope.

sendacow.org.uk/lessonsfromafrica