Here’s some exciting news to start 2022!

We are thrilled to announce that Charity Right is shifting its focus to school meals. Although there’s no clear, simple answer to poverty, we’ve found school meals have a huge impact on children’s development and their wider communities… so why not double down?

It’s an exciting development and we can’t wait to concentrate our efforts on school meals and see the enormous difference we’ll make.

Why are School Meals so Important?

The power of education and meals is unparalleled – with school meals, we can help children live a healthy, nutritional life while maximizing their chances in life and helping the wider community. Put simply, school meals are hugely effective in supporting both our beneficiaries and their communities, as well as generations to come.

The sad truth is that millions of children around the world are unable to go to school for various reasons, often because of poverty and their family needing them to work to earn enough money to feed everyone. Without their much-needed education, they’re unable to improve their situation and are trapped in the cycle of poverty.

However, school meals have a ripple effect that can make a huge difference. Millions are unable to afford to fee their children, so the promise of school meals if they attend school is enormously helpful to a poor family’s budget, providing an incentive to send them to school. This incentive has proved to increase school attendance, with boys’ enrolment increasing by 22% and girls’ by 28% - and it’s particularly effective for everyone when more girls go to school. 

With children going to school, not only do nutritious school meals help them develop physically and cognitively, but the lessons help educate the children, opening up doors to more job opportunities. These opportunities that were not available to their parents can help the children as they grow up and will in turn help improve the situation of the community in the future. In fact, for every $1 invested in school meals, communities can expect an economic return of $9 – especially since many school meal programmes are community-based, generating economic activity and financial support to local farmers.

A plate of healthy, nutritious food not only helps physically and cognitively develop child, but provides another reason to go to school, where each lesson a building block for a brighter future for them and their community.

Charity Right’s New Focus

With these benefits in mind, Charity Right is proud to start focusing on providing hot, healthy and nutritious meals to pupils in schools in various countries, as well as continuing to support children in Quran schools.

Moving forward, Charity Right sees itself as becoming a leader in regular school meal provision. We’re going to do just one thing but do it well. As we have gone on, we have become experts on providing school meals and have seen how effective the results are, with more children attending school and the families finding budgeting much easier.

We’re now more focused than ever and are determined to ensure every child has a daily hot meal and the chance to reach their potential. As we focus in on this objective, this year we will double the number of children we support with school meals from around 20,000 to approximately 40,000.

As a result, we will no longer be collecting new funds for family food packs or emergency appeals. Fortunately, there are still many charities that do this work very effectively.

Still, this has not been an easy decision – but here at Charity Right we use our knowledge, expertise and facts to make decisions, not just what’s popular. Nevertheless, we refuse to leave our families in the lurch, so we’ll be reviewing family support programmes carefully.

We believe that the move to focus on school meals will end up being more beneficial to communities than monthly food packs anyway. School meals help families with their budgets, boosting their incomes and helping to alleviate poverty. In fact, school meals represent 10% of the income of poor and vulnerable families, meaning school meals provide huge savings for some households. 

If you have already made a donation towards families or emergencies, please rest assured that we will continue to honour your donations and the funds will still go to those programmes you donated to. 

We are hugely excited to begin focusing on school meals and become leaders in helping children reach their potential. Please continue to support us as we move in a thrilling, and very promising, new direction!