Mary's Meals - A simple solution to world hunger that works

Mary’s Meals started working in Liberia in 1994. We provide over 20,000 children with daily meals in school, we support a school for the deaf and a technical school and we are developing a rice growing project. We also send regular deliveries of material aid through the Backpack campaign. Most of our projects are located in Bomi County.

School Feeding
We have been working in Liberia since 1994 and so have witnessed her people’s suffering over many difficult years of civil conflict. It is wonderful to be working together now in this time of peace and to do what we can to support the process of reconstruction.

Our main work is school feeding. Schools have
re-opened and pupils are starting to catch up on years of missed education. Most of our school feeding projects are in small village schools. Children are often too hungry to attend school, or are helping to find wild food (fruit and fish), and even if they do attend, they are in no state to concentrate and learn.

Mary’s Meals helps to relieve the burden for families and other community members, helping to tackle child malnutrition and also encourage children back to the classroom. Some of the village schools are so remote they cannot be reached by road. Instead the men of the village will walk to the nearest road and carry food back to their communities. Parents contribute by providing the vegetables for making the sauce and by taking their turn cooking the rice. We also provide Mary’s Meals in St Dominic’s secondary school where some of the pupils are former child soldiers.

Companion Projects

Oscar Romero School for the Deaf – life can be hard enough for a child in Liberia but if you are deaf as well then it can be very bleak indeed

St Benedict’s Technical School – many young people missed out on school because of the years of war.

Boosting Local Food Production – Liberia relies on food imports because farms are not sufficiently
re-established to feed the population.

Backpacks and more – regular deliveries of educational supplies help children go to school.

LIBERIA FACTS AND FIGURES
Population - 3.9 million
% population that is undernourished - 46
% population living below poverty line - 80
Infant Mortality Rate per 1000 live birth - 138.24
Primary Enrolment % - 66

Liberia is in Western Africa, bordering the North Atlantic Ocean, between Cote d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone. Liberia suffered a grievous civil war from 1989 to 2003. It left 250,000 people dead, thousands more were forced to flee from the fighting. One particularly ugly aspect to the war was the conscription of children as soldiers. In 2005 Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was elected president making her Africa’s first woman head of state.