Utete, TZ – Community encouraged by breakfast benefits, volunteers trenching – 31 Mar 2017

KCM continues to supply the local kindergarten with vegetables each day to supplement the white flour porridge the students are served. For most student the late-morning meal is their first of the day and teachers report that, as a result, students are more able to focus until the end of the school day.

KCM manager Yusa Mbonde has been working with the kindergarten teachers to find a way to measure the impact of the vegetables. Typically, Better Lives measures attendance and grade point average to see how meals are affecting student performance. However, these measures have not been effective for kindergarten students.

As local teacher Tatu Mtumbi explains, “We don’t give grades to kindergarten students because they are too young. Also, attendance is difficult to measure. During planting and harvesting seasons, parents will take their children with them to sleep and work on farms. It is difficult to know why children are missing school or attending school.”

Better Lives is continuing to collaborate with KCM to think of ways to measure the impact of the program. Parents and teachers, on the other hand, are convinced of the programs’ effectiveness based on their own observations. To show their support, local parents and teachers are re-trenching a broken waterline which supplies water to the kindergarten for cooking vegetables.

“If the parents didn’t see this program helping they wouldn’t be willing to dig this trench again,” explains Mbonde, “and the teachers wouldn’t have helped us organize the families.”

KCM is maintaining two gardens to support the breakfast program. Their primary garden is on the banks of the Rufiji River. They have a back-up garden on higher ground in case the river floods. At the moment, both gardens are productive so KCM has been able to sell excess vegetables in addition to supplying the kindergarten.