Ensure the hungry are fed and cared for.
In the Gospel story of the five loaves and two fishes, Jesus fed the multitude. Today, millions of people go to bed hungry even though there’s an abundance of food in this world. St.Ritah Women Development Association works on every level to ensure the hungry are fed.
How St.Ritah Women Development Association works on Food
St.Ritah Women Development Association has always helped people feed themselves rather than relying on handouts.
With the more extreme weather brought by climate change, this is more important than ever. If people are stripped of their assets and pushed deeper into poverty it becomes a vicious cycle where putting food on their family’s plates becomes even harder.
St.Ritah Women Development Association believes in looking forward by building communities’ preparedness, resilience and adaptation skills. If they are given the skills, tools, seeds and finance to escape subsistence agriculture, hunger can be banished.
St.Ritah Women Development Association focuses its joint efforts on how climate change affects the ability of the world’s poor women and vulnerable to feed themselves.
Food is an essential need for everyone and a lack of nutritious food not only harms health but deeply wounds people’s fundamental dignity.
St.Ritah Women Development Association advocates for the right to food, where everyone receives nutritious and adequate food Prices.
Our key areas on food are:
b) Agriculture
Most people in developing countries depend on agriculture for their very survival. Training them – especially in small-scale farming – is at the heart of St.Ritah Women Development Association’s work to ensure that they can feed their families properly and stay healthy.
St.Ritah Women Development Association distributes drought resistant seeds, provides wells to support sustainable irrigation systems and builds granaries and flood defenses. St.Ritah Women Development Association also sets up community gardens, where women farmers are particularly encouraged to plant new and more varied crops. This helps them to adapt to our changing climate and to have a surplus to sell. St.Ritah Women Development Association gives them help with equipment and credit.
Access to markets is a key St.Ritah Women Development Association concern. This means helping farmers with transport, financial capital and the skills and knowledge to know where and when to sell their goods for the best price. It sounds easy. But it’s not for the very poorest farmers who may live in remote areas. So St.Ritah Women Development Association helps them work in cooperatives to share their skills and knowledge and also to improve their yields.
Moving people beyond the uncertainty and poverty of subsistence agriculture – which in turn leaves them more vulnerable to extreme weather – is a major St.Ritah Women Development Association goal.
Malnutrition
Inadequate nutrition has a huge impact on poor and vulnerable people. It damages their health and their chances to succeed in life.
Malnutrition – the lack of enough of the right vitamins, minerals and proteins in the right balance – is devastating on the lives of young children. Their physical and mental capacities are reduced or damaged, particularly if they do not have proper nutrition in the first 1000 days of life.
St.Ritah Women Development Association teaches communities about the importance of eating well and of growing the right foodstuffs. It helps them access nutritious food by changing what they grow and training them to prepare for when disaster strikes. In times of emergency, St.Ritah Women Development Association programmes provide food distributions and supplementary feeding for the most vulnerable, especially mothers and children.