Funding Area: Education
The Lunchbox Fund helps vulnerable and food-insecure children in South Africa, Mozambique and Lesotho to get the education they desperately need to build a life free of poverty. They provide a nutritious daily school meal to children who would otherwise go hungry. This meal encourages children to attend school and enables them to concentrate and learn while they are there. Children are sustainably supported at all stages of their education – from pre-school, through to primary and secondary school and after-school programs.
The first five years of a child’s life are critical for their physical, social, emotional and cognitive development. The ‘essential package’ of integrated ECD services in South African policy covers the five pillars of: Social Services, Maternal and Child Health Interventions, Support for Primary Care Givers, Stimulation for Early Learning, and Nutrition Support. The Lunchbox Fund seeks to address two of these five pillars – Nutrition Support and Stimulation for Early Learning – through spearheading sustained nutrition provision in pre-schools and playgroups offering quality educare, across the country.
Investing resources to support and promote optimal child development from a young age yields compound dividends into adulthood, and contributes to a country’s truly sustainable development.
Projects We Support
Feeding Pre-Schoolers in Mozambique
Between October 2024 and June 2025, Lunchbox Fund responded to the critical need for nutrition support at Primary schools in Gaza Province Mozambique. This effort would be our first ever program outside of South Africa.
Within days of the program starting learners were bringing their younger siblings to school with them – with the express intention of ensuring they would also be fed. This presented an opportunity to develop nine pre-schools adjacent to the Primaries – the first early childhood development centres in the communities. Almost overnight 1,000 children were added to our program and we closed out the pilot reaching 5,258 children each school day. In addition 29 women were hired from within the schools’ immediate communities to prepare meals – their first formal, income earning employment and 27 Pre-School teachers were trained and employed through Associação Iniciative Mocambicana De Lanche Escolar, our in-country partner.
Today our formalised School Nutrition program reaches 8,000 children in 32 Pre-, Primary and Secondary Schools in Gaza Province. Pre-schoolers receive porridge prepared with freshly boiled water when they arrive at school. Lessons are held until noon, when the young learners join their Primary School siblings for lunch, before heading home.
Support Dates: April, 2026 – Ongoing
