GHANA
FOOD SECURITY
There are too many people struggling to have regular meal or nutritional balanced meal. There are many who are under nourished because they can’t afford any kind of balanced meal in years. With the COVID19 pandemic, these problems escalated.
With the poultry farming we are trying to fight the social ills of hunger, malnutrition, employment, poverty and dependency.
This Food Security program is a vision initiated by the Shine Church of the Nazarene when they saw the need and opportunity to help. The district NCM later partnered with the Shine Church to fulfil the vision. NCM then shared the vision with other local Nazarene churches of the district and started to raise funds. The poultry farm project is for the purpose of raising meat, eggs and employment opportunities for the needy, poor and vulnerable. Local churches continue to raise love offering each month towards this project. We raise eggs and chickens purposely for compassionate ministries and partially for economic development. 40% of the profits runs the project, and 60% contributes to alleviating the needy, vulnerable and poor. We also employ the youth to sell at the local market to assist with unemployment.
I have had young people wanting assistance from us for their educational needs and because we promote work ethics, the project gave them free crates of eggs to sell to get funds for those needs.
Mary was a school drop out because her parents could not afford to pay her final exam registration fees. Mary had stayed out of school for about 13 months before she found us and heard her story. We gave Mary free 30 crates of eggs to sell and raise funds for her school fees. She came for 3 crates of eggs each day and boiled the eggs and add a local tomato sauce and sells along the streets of Accra. Within a period of two weeks, she was able to raise the needed funds and she went back to school, settled her registration fee and sat for the exams.
During the COVID19 pandemic with the country on lockdown, most families lost sources of income and struggled severely to secure food for their homes. The pandemic has seriously affected the Ghanaian economy negatively and most homes find it difficult to eat a normal balanced diet. We went out into the streets to give away free chickens and eggs. We focused more on pregnant women, children and youth during the distributions.
We know of parents who kept the hens and raised them to lay eggs and reproduce more chickens, they sold the eggs for profits for their homes. The eggs and chicken meat help the homes to have a nutritional balanced meal at home also.
We have seen many young people and adults coming to our churches because of this simple food security program. We are praying to expand this project to enable us to reach more people in need as this has become and evangelistic tool for the church.