What we do

One in four South African children is so chronically malnourished that they are classified as stunted.

This means that those children are prone to suffer ill health, hypertension, diabetes and are likely to become obese later in life due to the permanent damage to their metabolic systems.

As bad as this is, there is worse:
In a country where access to food is a constitutional right, 7,500 children under the age of five die annually – not because of the long-term effects of malnutrition on their immune systems – but as a direct result of hunger.

That is one child every hour 365 days a year – literally starving to death!

And yet a third of all food produced in South Africa is wasted or ends up on landfills.

SOUL FOOD is the primary project of the Soul Provider Trust and its purpose is simply to feed the starving – with particular focus on students and school children.

Experience has revealed that it is almost impossible for young adults and children to learn anything or engage in extra-curricular activities like sport when they are desperately hungry.

Essentially SOUL FOOD is a logistics operation. We collect surplus food from farms, hotels, restaurants, entertainment venues, food manufacturers, supermarkets and stores.

We then deliver this food to hundreds of schools (and in the holidays to orphanages, shelters, old age homes and places of refuge).

Every day, the SOUL FOOD project feeds about 75,000 school children, orphans, pensioners and abused women, the destitute, sick and terminally ill.

This is currently 19 million meals a year or 1,5 million a month.

Our Vision

The Vision of the Soul Food project is to meaningfully participate in the reversal of the current crisis of stunting in South Africa by feeding hungry children with healthy, nutritious food at school and ECD Centres.

According to UNICEF, and the South African National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (SANHANES) there are 6,2 million children in South Africa under the age of five and 27% of them are stunted. This means that these children will not reach their full growth and developmental potential because of the irreversible physical and cognitive damage caused by persistent nutritional deprivations.

At the current rate, South Africa will have 1.7 million stunted children in 2025, which is nearly twice as high as the 900 000 target for 2025.

Our vision is to reduce this number to below 20% by 2030 and then eradicate it by 2050.