Health and Nutrition

Vision:

“Enhancing communities’ potential to access and create meaningful resources in a dignified way, to meet and sustain their health and nutritional needs through education and empowerment”

Mission:

• promote health education to build self-reliant sustainable communities
• reduce poverty by providing low cost nutritious food to affected communities.

One of the main programme of the Health and Nutrition focus area is the War against Malnutrition, Tuberculosis and Hunger [WARMTH]
OUR AIMS

• To relieve hunger and malnutrition by providing nutritious, low cost food to all those in need.
• To promote nutrition and health education.
• To improve community health.
• To stimulate community development.
• To preserve self-respect and human dignity.

Mapeto Nkhahle operates a WARMTH kitchen at the Naluxolo Primary School in Samora Machel settlement. On a normal school day, she serves an average of 80 cups of soup and 60 plates of soya and rice to the school children and staff, as well as others in the community. The majority of the meals are sold for about R1 [the equivalent of 7p or 14 cents].

Vulnerable needy people – such as children, pregnant and nursing mothers, those affected by HIV and AIDS, and the elderly – who cannot afford even these low prices, 'pay' for their meals with food vouchers issued by the CDC, clinic or other accredited centres.
The kitchen is not only self-sustaining, it also provides Mapeto with a regular income that allows her to care for herself and her family. At the same time, it is making a real impact on the health of the community by preventing malnutrition and disease.

This is the success of the WARMTH model – our first and longest running CWD programme. In fact, the first WARMTH kitchen opened in the tented community of Greenpoint, Khayelitsha, in 1968. Over the past 38 years, the programme has grown to a network of 72 kitchens throughout the Cape Metropolitan Area.

Although each kitchen starts off as a welfare response in desperate communities, they gradually progress to the point where they become sustainable, and ultimately economically viable. If you would like to contribute towards making this dream a reality, please click here.

Specialised feeding scheme for babies

Infants between birth and one year in these impoverished communities are particularly vulnerable to malnutrition, hunger and disease. Those who are unable to benefit from breast milk, and who are too small to eat solid food from the WARMTH kitchen attend special clinics where mothers receive baby milk formula and vitamin enhanced cereal.

Our dietitian runs workshops with groups of women, usually single, unemployed mothers with infants. In these weekly workshops, they deal with issues such as breast-feeding, the six food groups, oral rehydration therapy, HIV/Aids, Tuberculosis, worms and other primary health care issues. All of these are linked to nutrition and overcoming disease and hunger. In addition to this, Noluthando and Magdalene weigh and monitor the infants, ensuring that they are growing correctly.

If they falter, they are referred to the local clinic. At these workshops, mothers receive formula milk as well as rice cereal to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV/Aids, and for whatever other reason they are unable to breastfeed.

The workshops are held in areas where we have kitchens. The women can purchase low cost food for themselves and their children there each day. Should the women be so desperate that they cannot afford even the 60c which is required for a plate of food, then the health workers will provide them with coupons which they can exchange for food at the kitchen. Through these workshops which are run in four different areas an average of 80 women per week are reached. Some of them stay in the workshops for up to a year, learning all that they can about health and nutrition. They take the information back into their communities with them, and in turn, their neighbourhoods are enriched by this knowledge. 

FUNDERS

• L'Athénée De Luxembourg
• Ackerman Foundation
• Breadline Africa
• Clarion Printed Products
• Community Chest
• DG Murray Trust
• Department of Health
• Desmond Tutu TB Centre
• Friends of Warmth
• I&J
• Missio - Austria
• National Lottery
• Nestlé
• Stichting Porticus