Stop Hunger Now SA partners with Cotlands

Stop Hunger Now Southern Africa (SHN SA) and Cotlands – two non-profit organisations with a very similar vision – to improve the lives of young children in under-resourced areas – have initiated a pilot project that sees them joining forces to provide both the early learning programmes offered by Cotlands, and the nutritious food packed and supplied by SHN SA to pupils.

Stop Hunger Now SA is based in Driehoek, Germiston.

Cotlands is a non-profit early childhood development organisation addressing the education and social crisis by establishing early learning playgroups and toy libraries in poor communities, to serve vulnerable children aged birth to six.

Cotlands non-centre-based early learning playgroups, which number in excess of 129, provide learning opportunities in language and mathematical development, problem solving, gross and fine motor, social and emotional skills, using their mobile toy libraries.

This development intervention ensures that children start formal schooling on a par with their peers, and not lagging behind, which would eventually result in them being held back, possibly dropping out of school.

The Cotlands programme also ensures that the young pupils receive a nutritious meal, thus combating the very real problem of malnutrition and stunting – which will negatively affect the potential of the developing young mind.

Stop Hunger Now Southern Africa was established in South Africa in September 2009, with the vision of a Southern Africa without hunger and mission of transformation through education.

SHN SA currently distributes to 130 ECDs in Gauteng and 66 in Cape Town.

Cotlands engages with their ECDs twice a week.

The project will see SHN SA providing a meal pack (or six meal-servings) to pupils on the second visitation each week.

This meal pack offers nutritious food for the days the children are not partticipating in the Cotlands toy libraries.

The project originators, Jackie Schoeman (CEO of Cotlands) and Barry Mey (CEO of SHN SA), envisage the impact on the pupils to be threefold – improved nutrition, parents will be more committed to ensuring that children attend both days to benefit from the meal pack and increased development of fundamental skills children need to integrate into formal schooling.

This project will run for a period of six months, with approximately 2 500 children attending both weekly sessions and receiving a meal pack.

The impact will be monitored, indicating attendance, weight and height, as well as baseline and summative assessments, to determine what the pupils have gained from their attendance.

With two very committed and child-focused organisations leading this initiative, the young children who currently find themselves in a vulnerable and challenging situations, are given hope to start school and more importantly, finish their education and become adults who participate in the economic growth of Southern Africa.