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| ORGANISATION: | ACFS COMMUNITY EDUCATION AND FEEDING SCHEME |
| AREA: | JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA |
| GRANT PERIOD: | 2005 - 2006 |
| BENEFICIARIES: | 2,000 ORPHANS AND VULNERABLE CHILDREN |
South Africa may have one of Africa’s most developed economies, but the lives of many of its children remain stunted by severe under-nutrition, this has been exacerbated further by the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Over a million South African children have been orphaned as a result of AIDS.
ACFS, established during the apartheid era, has been providing impoverished families with emergency food parcels and the opportunity to set up a food garden for over 60 years. The AIDS pandemic has both inflated the problems they seek to address and sharpened their response to them.
EJAF funded ACFS to identify and support 2,000 orphaned & vulnerable children (OVC) in 7 impoverished Johannesburg townships. Many of these children have lost parents to AIDS and are either surviving on their own (in child headed households), or being cared for by a relative.
The strain on children caring for younger siblings or already impoverished families trying to feed more children cannot be overemphasised. This programme seeks to help them deal with two of their major issues - food and education.
The programme provides OVC households with a plot of land the size of a door (as illustrated here) along with training on how and what nutritious food to grow on it. These gardens should produce enough fresh food for the household and, whilst they are established, ACFS provides monthly food parcels to the neediest 1,000 families.
ACFS provides other services for these children, for example negotiating free school places, feeding children after school and monitoring their progress. They also help these children and their carers to access identity documents and social welfare grants from the government to increase their income where possible.