Together we Can DO MORE to Ease COVID-19 IMPACT

As South Africa works to contain the novel coronavirus, the DO MORE FOUNDATION is leveraging the power of partnerships to ease hunger in vulnerable households and to provide much-needed support for parents and caregivers.

This is a decisive and tightly coordinated strategic response to two issues that became glaringly obvious when the Covid-19 lockdown was announced.

“The first was: How are the 10 million children who are part of the national school feeding programme going to receive the one meal a day that they often rely on as their only meal? The second was, how are parents and caregivers going to engage their young children during the lockdown?” says DO MORE FOUNDATION Executive and Trustee, Warren Farrer.

Working through its established network of partners including Unicef, the World Health Organisation and government departments, the DO MORE FOUNDATION has addressed the latter issue by compiling a range of material to assist parents and caregivers to constructively support and interact with children at home. It is sharing these free materials with community radio stations and across its social media platforms, and is encouraging other organisations and the general public to share these as widely as possible.

To address the growing hunger challenge, the DO MORE FOUNDATION launched a special-purpose #DoMoreFeeding initiative which focuses on providing food to vulnerable children and their families from households across South Africa.

To enable it to procure food on the scale needed, the Foundation set up a separate Covid-19 bank account, and all funds donated go directly towards the purchase of staple foods like maize meal, flour, peanut butter and porridge. This is being provided at cost by its founder, RCL FOODS, which is one of the biggest food producers in South Africa.

In a crisis like this, it is vital that food is distributed quickly and on a large scale, which is why the DO MORE FOUNDATION is partnering with reputable, trusted organisations that have existing reliable networks that reach vulnerable households. These include Save the Children, Kago Ya Bana (KYB), FoodForward SA, Afrika Tikkun, SA Harvest, the Domino Foundation, Meals on Wheels and Gift of the Givers.  The Foundation is also using its Early Childhood Development (ECD) networks and partnerships such as TREE, ELRU, Cotlands, Siyakholwa and Diaconia in order to reach young children. In the longer term it will work with the National Department of Social Development’s implementing agents to coordinate food provision across provinces.

“With the Department identifying the needs on the ground and the Foundation ensuring the funnel of food is available to meet those needs, we are able to ensure high-impact relief where it is needed most,” says Farrer.

Having successfully delivered over 1 million meals in just over a month is proof of the DO MORE FOUNDATION’s core belief that ‘Together we can DO MORE’. Through donations received and RCL FOODS’ own contributions, food to the estimated value of R4,8 million has been provided so far across 7 provinces. And this is just the start.  

“We encourage new donors to make use of our dedicated #DoMoreFeeding Covid-19 relief fund and be a part of this literally life-saving effort. Every cent is accounted for and donors can see the impact they are making by following the daily tracker on our website, that shows the number of meals donated to date.

“Together we can and will DO MORE to ease the impact of Covid-19 on South Africa’s most vulnerable communities,” Farrer ends.

The DO MORE FOUNDATION is an independently audited, registered non-profit and public benefit organisation, founded by RCL FOODS in 2017, which catalyses impactful partnerships across the public, private and NGO sector to bring about sustainable change in the areas of early childhood development, youth and hunger.