FOOD FOR CHANGE

I am currently running a project entitled “FOOD FOR CHANGE” which founded in early January 2020. I run the programme online via Whatsapp and most of its subscribers are women and young girls. There are also a handful of men who are members of this platform. The programme is geared at helping women to learn how to cook healthy food for their families especially fresh vegetables. In this programme, I post recipes of food created by myself for the group members and sometimes I give them practical lessons via videos or audios. When they have any doubts, they reach out to me for more clarification and I answer. I also teach these women how to shop for some of the food recipes such as “banana puff puff” which requires a lot of bananas. We have lots of bananas in our region but they tend to be costly if bought from retailers of already ripe bananas, so I encourage the members to buy bunches of unripe bananas which are cheaper and then serve the family longer once they are ripe. This recipe helps in that women can use the puff puff to entertain even visitors as well give to their kids to take to school as snacks. All of this is done from my home and the members do not need to move physically to get the knowledge that I dispatch. All they need is an android telephone and internet connection and they can learn from their homes at their convenience.

 More than 500 people will be impacted by my work as this is a network involving individuals who have families, their friends, neighbours, and visitors.

The work I do requires a lot of internet data which of course is costly. So, for me to be able to continue running this programme effectively, I need a constant supply of broadband internet data which implies that I will need some funding for this aspect. Secondly, I do this via my personal mobile phone which has a limited storage capacity. This makes it difficult for the phone to function well as videos, audios and the messages that I post as well as responses from members tend to freeze the phone. Thirdly, in order to free space for more videos, I tend to delete important data which I already stored and this is bad. Consequently, I also need a good tablet with a considerable memory space which can permit to keep my data for longer periods. I will like to have something like a special laptop in which I can transfer all my lessons.

So far I have 18 participants and they are very impressed with what they have learnt from me so far and they are very thankful and happy. Some of them post samples of what they have cooked following the lessons they received.