Our school feeding program - The One Bread Project - all started with Charlotte, our Program Manager at the bakery in Gicumbi, identifying a need in her community for addressing the issue of childhood hunger. Identifying this gap in the market was the easy part, but figuring out how The Women’s Bakery could step in challenged our team in new ways. Thankfully, we received a generous grant from Abbott Fund which allowed us to build out our One Bread Project which we plan to expand as we finish out this year.
Through the end of July, The Women’s Bakery supplies bread on a daily basis to five schools in the Gicumbi District for children between the ages of six and twelve. In the past year, the program has grown from serving one school of 440 students to now serving five schools with ~3,000 students total. Three of these schools have committed to continue buying bread from us for the remainder of the school year, once the current grant expires in July.
We are also proud to share that Tessa, our Program Manager in Ruyenzi, has also their first school partnership in the region and will be starting with seving 680 students per day.
So what is the impact of our school feeding program? Currently, we serve 3,037 students! Our social impact team at The Women’s Bakery has been working with our partner schools to study the impact of our bread on the students. We learned that many students were only eating one meal per day (dinner) so our bread was supplementing their diets. Not only do the students find our bread delicious but it is also good for them, with the added benefit of 7-9 grams of protein since our breads are naturally fortified with eggs and eggs. On top of the nutritional value, teachers reported that there were fewer disciplinary cases in their classroom, school attendance went up, and students were overall more attentive and engaged in the class. In fact, 96% percent of teachers that we surveyed reported that our bread acts as an incentive for students to stay in school.
What’s next? When the COVID-19 lockdowns hit Rwanda and schools had to shut down, we heard that students reported missing our bread. At one point, our bread delivery to a school was delayed and students even refused to go back to their classrooms after their break until they received our bread.
As we head into the second half of 2021, our team in Gicumbi and Ruyenzi is working on securing more partnerships with new schools and sustaining our partnerships with our current schools. While some of our schools have confirmed that they will continue buying our bread once the grant funding runs out, we are working on raising funds to ensure that the schools that cannot afford to pay on their own will continue being supplied with our bread.
We know that #BreadPower is working to fuel children and we plan to grow the program in the future years. Interested in supporting The One Bread Project? Check out our Donate page today!
