The Malilangwe Trust, through its child nutrition program, provides a balanced meal to 19 500 children every school-going day. Included in this number is a significant community of children under the age of five years old. The meal is a corn-soy blend, which is distributed to the feeding points by the Malilangwe Neighbourhood Outreach team. The Trust has empowered mothers from the community to be custodians of the project by having them administer the feeding points, a role which includes stock control, meal preparation and recording of child attendance. In total there are 413 feeding points distributed around Malilangwe’s boundary, some located as far as 40 kilometres away.
In addition to the child nutrition program, six irrigation schemes in the district have also been established, each supporting 150 people. Water is supplied by hand-pumped or solar boreholes installed by the Trust, and various women’s groups have been empowered to oversee this project. The vegetables grown are mostly for personal consumption; however, in most cases the yield exceeds the growers’ own needs. This allows them to sell their produce at local community markets. In this way, they supplement their own income, while providing a ready source of reasonably priced vegetables to those in need in their communities.