Soaring costs and load-shedding hits children’s feeding scheme

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The Tiger Brands Foundation (TBF) is struggling to keep up its in-school breakfast programme which has been feeding thousands of needy students for more than a decade, because of soaring food prices and financial constraints linked to the economic fallout from load-shedding.

The foundation’s breakfast programme, which started in 2011 and complements the lunch provided by the national school nutrition scheme, is serving meals to 67 700 learners each day at 91 schools across South Africa’s nine provinces.

Its operations manager Karl Muller said as the country grapples with the acute energy crisis with, until fairly recently, long and frequent power outages, many industries have been negatively affected, which has led to a fast-declining economy. 

“As a result, many businesses are facing the prospect of either closing their doors or right-sizing their operations to cope with higher operating costs brought on by the lack of reliable energy supply in South Africa,” he said.

“The overall trend that we are seeing is lower profitability for businesses, which means that those organisations that typically support in-school nutrition programmes, either through their corporate social investment initiatives or as part of an existing long-term financial arrangement, are going to experience a profit squeeze.” 

Recent research by the Agricultural Business Chamber shows that the effects of load-shedding, which intensified in January this year, will probably underpin prices for a few months, with food producers having to spend large amounts of money on generating their own electricity. This has a knock-on effect on prices and many staple foods have become unaffordable for poorer households. 

“With the poverty and unemployment rates already at staggeringly high levels in South Africa, a huge portion of the population was already food insecure,” Muller said. “Food price inflation, driven by load-shedding, will only add to this problem, with an increasing number of people now facing the prospect of going hungry.”

He said it cost South Africans more than R500 more for a balanced, nutritious food basket at the beginning of this year than it did a year ago, resulting in more children being dependent on in-school nutrition programmes.

But organisations that support these initiatives are themselves under financial pressure and struggling to donate as much as they did previously. 

“TBF already has all the infrastructure in place so it would be easy for it to leverage new contributions to ensure that they have maximum impact on the most vulnerable learners in our communities,” Muller said.

He said the foundation was calling on companies to contribute to established nutrition programmes to ensure that 100% of their offerings went towards alleviating the financial pressures experienced by nonprofit organisations due to the rising cost of living. 

By contributing to well-established nutrition programmes, companies would not have to worry about running their own programmes, having to consider their reach in terms of how many vulnerable learners receive a nutritious breakfast or compromise on the quality of meals,” Muller added.

“At times like these, we need to position ourselves to do more with less,” he said.

“Therefore, maximising resources by allocating them where they will have the most impact should be a priority for any organisation that wants to contribute meaningfully to nutrition programmes that have real impact.”