Daily Maverick and SA Harvest’s food campaign — Restoring dignity and hope this festive season

From leaving Cape Town for Lusikisiki with ambitious goals but limited funds, to being overwhelmed by the gratitude shown by grateful recipients, SA Harvest CEO Ozzy Nel believes one word can sum up three years of Buckets of Nutrition campaigns – hope.

“This campaign provides real hope. We give children a fighting chance. Many are so scarred by what they have been through – this is a way for us to restore their hope and their dignity,” he said.

“We make people feel like they matter. We know that providing food to families makes children feel safe.”

In 2023, after Daily Maverick and SA Harvest started the first campaign to provide food parcels to families in Lusikisiki and surrounding areas, Nel left for Durban, from where he was to drive down to the Eastern Cape, without the necessary donor funding in place.

“I saw what was possible. We had R35,000 in the bank by the time we landed in Durban. We wanted to feed 1,000 families. A week later, we had a million rand. By the end of that campaign, we had over R2-million, and we could feed 2,000 families… All thanks to the incredible Daily Maverick readers,” he said.

Last year, the campaign raised a similar amount for buckets that were distributed to vulnerable families whose children were in hospital or being treated for chronic conditions.

This year, the campaign will focus on families with children in holiday programmes – making sure they have enough to eat and that their families will have enough food not to worry about empty tummies over Christmas. After being alerted of an urgent need for women-led families affected by gender-based violence, some of the buckets will also be distributed to families in crisis.

Nel explained that the organisation’s deep-rooted relationship with the women who cook for children during the year provides a valuable resource to identify families who would benefit most from the buckets to be distributed.

He said the “cooking gogos” also contribute their knowledge to designing the Buckets of Nutrition, as they must be filled with ingredients that families need and will use. “We also added some cookies and sweeties because it is Christmas,” he said. “It makes a huge difference to the life of a child that are already marginalised.

“This year, for example, we were alerted to the fact that many of the children in the target communities also have worms, which can contribute to malnutrition, so we have added some soap and other cleaning products to help with this,” Nel said.

He said the bucket was designed to get a family through the festive season until the children are back at school and settled into receiving meals again through school-feeding programmes.

Explaining the donation process, Nel said it is one of SA Harvest’s founding principles that the process must be absolutely transparent. “We digitised everything we do from Day 1. We geo-locate our donations, and we time-stamp them. We can tell you exactly what went where.”

He said that SA Harvest had learnt from working with the Solidarity Fund to distribute aid worth millions during the Covid-19 pandemic how important it is to use technology to track every bucket.

“The family signs for it. It is transparent. We use our community contacts to point us to those who are the most marginalised. Our gogos are practically like social workers. They are helping these children for a very long time, and they know exactly who is most vulnerable,” he said. “We rely on them to help us create the list. When we hand over the bucket, we take a picture, and the family signs it. It is geo-located. It is our winning recipe.

“We never prescribe when we come into an area. We listen, and then we connect the dots,” he said.

Earlier this year, during a presentation to the South African Human Rights Commission, the national director-general of health, Sandile Buthelezi, highlighted that, among other issues, it was of great concern that the Nelson Mandela Bay metro, which had not in the past suffered the high levels of severe acute malnutrition experienced in the Eastern Cape’s rural areas, now had among the highest levels of malnutrition in the province.

The Buckets of Nutrition campaign will start in Nelson Mandela Bay, but if enough support is received it will be extended nationally later in December and January.

Read more: More than two dozen children have starved to death in Nelson Mandela Bay in the past year

What does a Bucket of Nutrition look like?

The buckets are more expensive than last year, at R1,000 apiece. Still, they contain significantly more nutritious food products, a few treats and some cleaning materials that will be sufficient to carry families into the new year. Any donation towards a bucket will do; it isn’t necessary to contribute the full amount.

A Bucket of Nutrition contains the following:

• 10kg maize meal;
• 5kg rice;
• 2kg samp;
• 500g macaroni;
• 500g soup mix (dry);
• 2 × 410g tinned beans ;
• Baked beans;
• 1 × 400g pilchards;
• 500g soya mince;
• 400g peanut butter;
• 500g instant milk powder;
• 2 × 400g tinned mixed veg ;
• 1kg potatoes / butternut;
• 1 pack Morvite / FutureLife econ pack;
• 750ml cooking oil;
• 1kg sugar;
• 1 × 12-pack stock cubes;
• 500g salt;
• 400g mixed sweets value bag;
• 400g extra mixed sweets value bag;
• 1 pack family biscuits;
• 2 packets of jelly powder;
• 750ml dishwashing liquid;
• 1 laundry bar; and
• 1 bottle Jik / detergent (small)

How to donate

These are the banking details for SA Harvest:

Please use your name, surname and DM as a reference. If you would like to remain anonymous, you need only use DM as a reference.

SA Harvest
Business Platinum Account
First National Bank
Account Number: 62693490478
Branch Code: 255955 (Randpark Ridge)
Swift: FIRNZAJJ
To donate online, please follow this link: Buckets of Hope - SA Harvest

The campaign will run until early January. DM