Charity which provides meals to school pupils reaches 3m mark

A Scottish charity which provides meals to school pupils in poverty-hit countries is now feeding three million children every day after it scaled up its global aid operation.

Mary’s Meals, which started from humble beginnings in a shed in Dalmally, Argyll and Bute, in 2002, is now providing meals for children in 16 countries.

Having started off feeding just 200 people with the help of donations, founder Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow says he “could never have imagined” the scale of the operation now.

Mr MacFarlane-Barrow founded the charity after visiting Malawi during a famine, where he met a mother who was dying from Aids and her eldest son, Edward.

Edward told the founder his hopes and dreams for life were “to have enough food to eat and to go to school one day”.

Some 23 years later, the charity now provides for children in Haiti, South Sudan, Syria and many other countries where child poverty is rife.

A 10p donation alone is enough to fund a meal for a child, the charity says.

The charity had been feeding about 2.2 million children until the start of 2024, when it scaled up to provide more, now reaching the three million milestone.

Mr MacFarlane-Barrow, who still works out of the same tin shed in Dalmally which serves as Mary’s Meals’ global headquarters, said: “When we first began serving Mary’s Meals in one small primary school in Malawi back in 2003, we could never have imagined that this would grow into a global movement now serving more than three million children every school day.

“At the same time, when we see how this simple, inexpensive intervention is helping to transform some of the world’s poorest communities, we have an urgent desire for it to grow faster – and a belief that it can.

“This work has grown the way it has because all over the world people of goodwill are sharing a little of what they have so that children can eat and go to school, thus gaining an education that can set them free from poverty.

“We see that each time local volunteers begin to serve our school meals, using locally-sourced food, hope enters in.

“Children begin attending school for the first time, because of the promise of a meal. And those who were previously too hungry to concentrate in class are now able to learn.”

Last month, Edinburgh schoolboy Lochlan McCole climbed Mount Kilimanjaro to raise £1,000 for Mary’s Meals while later in September great-grandmother Ellison Hudson, 87, will tackle 30 miles on her tricycle to celebrate the charity reaching the three million mark.

Despite the latest milestone, Mr MacFarlane-Barrow issued a rallying call for people to help the charity to reach the next million hungry children waiting for a meal, with 71 million primary school-age children out of school.

He said: “Whilst it is an amazing thing that this work has grown to reach three million children, the sad reality is that tens of millions of children remain hungry and out of school.

“This very day, in a world in which we produce more than enough food for us all, thousands of children will die of hunger-related causes. And yet it costs Mary’s Meals around 10p to serve one meal, and less than £20 to feed a child for a whole school year.

“This landmark is less a celebration than it is a call to action. We invite every person of goodwill to join the Mary’s Meals movement so that our vision – that every child in this world receives one daily meal in their place of education – might be realised.”