Hi everyone,

I'm Robbie, founder and CEO of a small Scottish registered NGO which has worked in Western Rwanda for five years successfully carrying out education, health and agriculture programmes. Today however, we are carrying out emergency food relief to our beneficiary communities who are in dire situation due to COVID-19 and the measures taken to stem the spread of the virus.

To raise money for the important work, my challenge is to walk 2.6 km with 20 litre of water, just like the kids on our programme do everyday. This seemed like a good occasion to walk a mile in their shoes.

What the funds will be used for:

COVID-19 has made its way to Rwanda and threatens to wreak havoc on the country’s fragile health care system. To stem the spread of the virus, the Rwandan Government has imposed a country-wide lockdown set to last 30 days at the shortest. In Western Rwanda, many families survive on less than a dollar a day and rely on subsistence farming to put food on the table for themselves and their children. As they are currently unable to farm during the lockdown, they do not have access to food and thus are in an extremely precarious and dangerous situation.

We have already coordinated closely with the local government and have provided emergency food aid to 1,215 vulnerable individual. These families now have food for the next 15 days and will be able to survive the initial lockdown. But there are still many more families that we have been unable to reach due to limited funds.

We have designed an emergency food parcel sourced entirely from local markets. These parcels have been designed based on World Food Programme and UNHCR models and adapted to the local context of our beneficiaries and the global pandemic. Each parcel contains the essential nutrients required to keep an individual alive and healthy, we have also included an additional source of vitamin C to reinforce immune systems and soap so they can.

For a family of five, a food parcel will contain 7 kilos of maize flour, 15 kilos of beans, 2 kilos of vegetable oil (fortified with vitamin A and D), 1 kilo of Iodized salt, 1 kilo of sugar, 2 kilos of oranges, 1 bar of soap, and if there are young children in the family, 7 kilos of sorghum porridge. The total cost of an emergency food parcel containing food for 15 days is only £5 per person.