South Africa: a life-changing initiative
Every day in South Africa, restaurants, hotels and supermarkets have tonnes of surplus food intended to be thrown away. At the same time, thousands of people, including children, have nothing to eat.
Abundance alongside poverty. Is it impossible for these two extremes to meet? Why is food surplus not turned into meals for those who would otherwise have nothing to eat?
Soul Provider Project created an answer to this question, by allowing thousands of South African children to eat, avoiding malnutrition and having the energy to study, play and live their childhood.
Who is Soul Provider?
Soul Provider was established in 2008 in Johannesburg, the most densely populated city in South Africa. This Christian-based NGO assists children from poor and disadvantaged families, regardless of their creed, ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
The model created by the NGO for the Soul project is simple: collecting surplus food from supermarkets, hotels, restaurants in a kind of food bank and making it available to organisations, associations, schools, charitable establishments operating in the area, thus reaching directly hundreds of thousands of people who would otherwise have nothing to eat.
Our involvement with Soul provider comes in the wake of the various initiatives that we implemented together with associations and NGOs in South Africa, aimed to meet the needs of the local communities living around our renewable plants.
Sharing means doing away with waste
Since July 2016, Enel Green Power started collaborating with Soul Provider, the organisation that conceived the project, in the area of Hankey a township 50 km from our Gibson Bay plant and 80km from Port Elizabeth, a major city in the Eastern Cape Province,
Every week Soul Provider hands out some 3,500 meals to children and teenagers from schools, hospitals, orphanages, shelters. Every year the Soul project distributes more than 1,750,000 meals, avoiding the waste of around 1,000 tons of food surplus that would otherwise be thrown away.
“Many kids are malnourished and really just come to school for food! It is the most desperate situation and they wouldn’t cope if it wasn’t for Soul Food and Enel Green Power”
Rev Brent Chalmers, OSB Cam Founder and Managing Trustee
With the children of Port Elizabeth
We have become supporters and partners of Soul provider in this project because it helps directly and immediately a community in proximity to our Wind farm who are among the most vulnerable in South Africa
For the schoolchildren that the project addresses in the suburbs of Port Elizabeth, having lunch at school means not only eating and avoiding a serious risk of malnutrition, but also having the energy to play, study, live.
“We are grateful to have you in our team, because some of our students that come from disadvantaged families are now regularly attending school, thanks to your support and the help you are providing”
Z. Kula, headmaster at the Vukani Combined School to EGP RSA
Children are among the recipients of our attention because they are the present and the future of this African country. The partnerships with the NGOs Mother 2 Mother and Ubuntu originate from the same concern that drives the Soul Provider project.
In response to the United Nations, which called on companies to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, our commitment in South Africa mainly involves children and families, in order to ensure appropriate education to youngsters and children, and therefore suitable health and living conditions.