Feeding Africa's Hungry

Africa is one of the, if not the, most poverty striken continents in the world. South Africa, Africa's largest economy, is no different. Some cities here are bubbling metropolitan places that hide the reality behind a visage of tourism agendas. Travel to the edegs of these metros and a new world awaits. One that is the defenition of poverty and HIV/AIDS and death. The children there have nothing to eat although their parents travel to the city everyday to earn a meager wage. They go to schools where feeding schemes are in place buy their efficiency is burdened by the greed of its administrators. They need more than just lunch, they need sustainable means of surviving from day to day.

Now the probelm has been identified at face value but it is jelpful to invgestigate a little deeper. Poverty is associated very close with illteracy or at least, bad eductaion. The people in that area have always been in the circle of poverty and hunger and their ambitions for a valuable education have fallen to the wayside as "reality" sets in. They have been forced to marginalise hope and persue "practicality". That is where the problem must first be fixed, at it's roots.

Soup kitchens are underway here that provide homeless people with food everyday but that does not given them food security. A couple of other innitiatives are underway where people go to workshops and are taught the essentials of farming.

The solutions i propose are more not groundbreaking in the figurative sense but they are in the literal one. It is time people learnt to sustain themselves. Mobile eductaion. If the people for what ever reason had to drop out of school, it is time school comes to them. At the momoent you may think I've lost the topic entirely but consider this; what if the education was more than just about books but also about helping people farm? The eductaion 'vans' would house educators as well as people who know about farming and agriculture plus basic components required for a succesful vegetable garden. The van would tackle a community at a time and then when the community seems capable of sustaining its new found skill. This would allow for a knowledge sharing approach but also assiatance to this people who simply do not have the resources to farm. Eventuall the community could be set up with a a vendor who buys the vegetables from them and then sells them himself as his own business enterprise.

This solution however, is limited to areas like my own, where poverty is a symptom of something like eductaion but, admitadly, the plan would fail terribly if the community was, for example, under environmental constraints.