From the Codespa Foundation, one of our winners of this year of the award Natura, they send us a summary of the winning project "Bidones against hunger".
27 years of civil war in Angola, they have made her the longest war in Africa. This has meant that the Angolan have lost their homes, their crops, after all, their life. Although Angola is a country rich in natural resources, where agriculture has always been an important source of income, they lost their knowledge, experience and infrastructure to be able to live from the field and what it offered them. As a consequence, many basic foods have to be imported and only some people can have access to them.
War scars
Today, hunger is one of the main problems of the country: more than half of the population, 54.8%, is in extreme poverty. According to the Human Development Index, Angola is in position 148 of the world of a total of 182 countries. At the end of the war, he opted for rapid growth in the country, importing basic foods at very high prices and causing a high cost of life. A life cost that the most vulnerable peasants have no access.
In the case of Huambo, it is one of the provinces most affected by Angola's food insecurity. The civil war hit this province and currently, 92.5% live in a situation of food insecurity, being serious in 47.50% of cases. This situation mainly affects children under 5, who by not eating sufficient amounts of proteins and calories, suffer from malnutrition.
Almost half of the population of Huambo lives in rural areas and 76% is dedicated to agriculture. An activity that, due to the data mentioned above, is not enough to be able to feed and live in a dignified way. One of the factors that most affects food insecurity is that they do not have adequate infrastructure to store food and keep them for the so -called "months of hunger." This is the months of December, January and February, in which the peasants are producing the new crops but in which they have already exhausted the crops of the previous months, so they do not have food to be able to feed in an adequate way . This causes to resort to the importation of basic foods. Something that peasant families cannot access due to their low economic income.
In the areas of the province of Huambo where Codespa works, 69.1% of families fail to store food more than four months after the harvest collection. This is because they use sacks of raffia and silos created with palm leaf. With these sacks, the peasants have losses of up to 55% of their crops stored because they do not have the appropriate characteristics to preserve the food.
Thanks to the support of Natura, Codespa will be able to continue working to change this situation. The objective is that these peasants can access a low -cost storage system that allows them to save their crops for more months and thus ensure that they have sufficient foods to spend the “months of hunger”.
Formation of the use of drums
More information about the project here:
http://www.codespa.org/proyectos/el_reciclaje_de_bidones_alimenticios_permite_a_las_familias_almacenar_sus_cosechas_y_alcanzar_la_seguridad_alimentaria?offset=0&country=angola