Join us as we explore how food banks are getting food to people who need it most, reducing food loss and waste, and creating stronger, healthier communities.
Rosario's Story
By James Fredrick
As she pulls off the lid, steam billows up from the heaping pot of chicken and rice and fogs Rosario Gutierrez’s glasses. The chickens used to prepare the meal were raised here in town. Beans simmering in an adjacent pot were also grown a stone’s throw from the outdoor kitchen.
“Mmmmm, smells good,” she tells the cooks, other mothers in the community who regularly prepare meals for schoolchildren in their town of Ishama’ana, in Colombia’s northeastern La Guajira state.
Rosario and the others spoon chicken and rice onto plates alongside a banana and then pour glasses of milk. Right on cue, lines of schoolchildren make their way under the blazing midday sun toward rows of tables filled with plates under the shade of thatched roofs.
Dozens of children say a prayer in wayuu, the local language of the region’s ethnic group of the same name, before they dig in. Everyone is hungry after an energetic morning at school. Four-year-old Ivana Jusaya Armas eats her rice with gusto and then washes it down with milk. She’s a healthy height and weight for her age. All the children here are.
But that’s not the case in many of the surrounding wayuu villages, and it wasn’t like this in Ishama’ana until recently. In 2024, 31 children under 5 years old died from acute malnutrition in La Guajira, the most in the country.
“There are families here that would go full days without eating,” says Rosario, 68, the Indigenous leader of the community. “Well, they did until the food bank arrived.”
Across dozens of wayuu communities, La Guajira Food Bank (Banco de Alimentos de La Guajira, in Spanish), part of the ABACO network of food banks across Colombia, has embarked on the challenging but critical mission of transforming some of the country’s most marginalized communities through programs that go well beyond what most expect from a food bank.
Rebecca Badillo Jimenez, the executive director of La Guajira Food Bank, knew just what a challenge they faced when the food bank was launched in 2019. She had long worked in the ABACO network, having served as executive director of the Barranquilla Food Bank, but La Guajira was unique.
“This land, this region is very unequal,” she says. “It has some of the highest rates of poverty. It’s a region highly vulnerable to natural disasters. It has few public services.”
La Guajira is a desert peninsula that sticks out into the Caribbean Sea, susceptible to both devastating storms and drought. The native wayuu people, who make up more than half of the state’s population, mostly live in rural villages across the state and subsist on raising goats and traditional weaving. But due to a lack of social investment from the state and the corrosive effects of climate change, food insecurity has reached critical levels in many wayuu villages.
“As food banks, we specialize in recovering and redistributing food, but we do much more than that,” says Juan Carlos Buitrago, executive director of ABACO. “We design specialized programs to address the root causes of hunger, and that’s what the food bank in La Guajira set out to do.”
Food support was important in La Guajira, but it wouldn’t be enough, according to Rebecca. She wanted to help communities feed themselves.
Amidst the bleak landscape, color pops from La Guajira. The wayuu are known throughout Colombia and beyond for their vibrant, intricate weaving, most often used to make ornate cylindrical bags known as mochilas.
“We thought about how we could work through the weavers, because that is the productive potential of the wayuu,” Rebecca said. “We wondered how we could support them and the nutrition of their children.”
In communities like Ishama’ana, they met leaders like Rosario and dozens of weavers.
“The process began by identifying women in the community who have children at risk [of malnutrition],” said Maria Alejandra Duran, director of programs for the food bank with a background as a social worker. “And they’d tell us, ‘I know how to sew, but I can’t afford thread.’”
Many women faced the choice between feeding their children or buying thread to generate income.
That was how the food bank created the Thread Bank, or Banco de Hilos, launching the program with Rosario in Ishama’ana. It works like this: wayuu women register themselves in the Thread Bank and are given enough thread to be able to weave one bag, in addition to regular deliveries of family food baskets. Once they are finished weaving, the food bank buys the bag from them for about $20, double what they can get at local artisan markets.
“It’s a circular process,” says Maria Alejandra. “You get thread and then come back to us with a finished bag. We send you back to your community with more thread, food and income. And the process starts again.”
Weavers have stable income and food support, while the food bank generates revenue by selling the bags to consumers, allowing them to expand their services to more communities. Since 2021, The Global FoodBanking Network has provided financial and other support to La Guajira Food Bank and the ABACO network to support this initiative and other work with wayuu communities.
Rosario says the impact among weavers in Ishama’ana has been tremendous.
“The weavers have progressed a lot. Their lives have changed,” she says. “They can now afford to dedicate themselves to their artisan work.”
As the food bank expanded to more wayuu communities, they identified other challenges and solutions based on the same idea as the Thread Bank, says Badillo.
“We wanted to figure out how to make investments in communities so that over time, they could sustain a local economy themselves, and the day would come when they are self-sufficient and don’t need external support.”
Every step of the way, Rosario and the community in Ishama’ana worked hand in hand with the food bank to develop new programs.
“We’re involved in every food bank program because of the responsibility we feel for the work, for the well-being of our community,” Rosario says.
Maria Alejandra says local leadership is important: “What we want is for communities like Ishama’ana to become protagonists of their own development, and we’re just helping them along the way.”
Another challenge was access. Most wayuu communities are food deserts, lacking even a simple corner shop. People must travel by motorcycle and then bus to get to a store, which can cost as much as a day’s wages.
So La Guajira Food Bank helped communities open a Solidarity Store. They provide the first supply of the store — rice, beans, pasta, salt, sugar, produce, cleaning and hygiene products, and other staples — and put the community in charge of running it. They price items at below-market rates so it’s affordable. With what the store earns — which is held in a community-run fund — they restock at the food bank. And the cycle continues.
“This shop supplies Ishama’ana and about 12 other small communities around us,” Rosario says as she counts out change for a young girl buying a bag of rice for her mother. She smuggles a little chocolate among the change and slides it to the girl with a wink. “The closest other shop is in another community down the road, but the prices are higher there.”
Next came chicken raising. The food bank donates baby chicks and the materials to build a pen and raise the chickens to maturity, either for slaughter or for laying eggs. The community sends a portion of what they produce back to the food bank — to be distributed to other communities in need — and they keep the rest, free to sell it for revenue for the community fund or use it for communal meals.
They’re doing the same with community gardens, donating seeds and materials to get farming started.
“What the food bank does is donate the first seed, whether it’s for farming, for raising animals, for weaving, and what the community gets from that, they sell to plant more, to grow more,” says Maria Alejandra.
This suite of programs for wayuu communities, known as Food for All, or Alimento para Todos, has evolved organically since 2019, with Gutierrez and Ishama’ana at the helm.
“Ishama’ana has accepted all the challenges and pilot projects the food bank has proposed,” says Rebecca. “Ishama’ana has become the reference point for other communities where we’re working.”
Faced with such challenging circumstances, intelligent program design based on self-sustaining activities was important. But something else was much more fundamental, says Rebecca.
“If we don’t find women like these, Rosario and other women in the community, we are not really going to see the change we want,” she says. In the matriarchal wayuu society, Indigenous women leaders like Gutierrez are taking on the challenge. And they’re reaping the benefits.
When La Guajira Food Bank first visited Ishama’ana in 2019, they identified 13 children at risk of acute malnutrition and enrolled them in a specialized feeding program while registering their mothers in the Thread Bank program. Today — and since 2023 — there is not a single child in Ishama’ana at risk of acute malnutrition.
“The food bank has been wonderful, it has transformed lives and the well-being of our community,” says Rosario. “People come and admire our community and see that it can be done. Change is possible.”
By the end of 2024, La Guajira Food Bank had registered 449 wayuu women across 28 communities in the Thread Bank. Dozens of other communities have opened Solidarity Stores and are beginning chicken raising and farming programs.
As the schoolchildren in Ishama’ana lean back in their chairs, satisfied after a hearty lunch, they joke and play and laugh, antsy to keep moving. Rebecca looks on with a smile.
“You can see it: the children of Ishama’ana are healthy, they’re active, they’re happy,” she says. “Knowing we can contribute to that is wonderful and motivates us to continue in other communities.”
Elanur's Story
By Jason Woods
More often than not, when Adıyaman Support Market shoppers walk in the door, they’re greeted with a big smile from Elanur Çakır at the register. If people coming to the Support Market are new, Elanur shows them around the long, fully stocked aisles. Then she explains the checkout process, which is based on a system of points instead of money.
But at this moment, Pinar Sedefilik, who happens to be Elanur’s favorite customer, is stopping by. The two take a moment to catch up.
“I love her energy,” Elanur says. “She smiles a lot, she’s talkative. She’s a strong single mother.”
The market has become a lifeline for so many people in Adıyaman who were affected by the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that hit this part of the country in 2023. It’s a part of Basic Needs Association, or TIDER, which supports a network of food banks that serve more than 1 million people in 40 cities across Türkiye. Each food bank is set up like a grocery store, giving patrons a wide variety of food, cleaning and hygiene products.
Elanur and her family actually live just three doors down from Pinar and her daughters in Umut Kent K20, also known as Hope City, a collection of small, tightly packed houses converted from shipping containers in the middle of Adıyaman.
“The earthquake was really hard for everyone here,” Elanur said. “We lost a lot. To still be alive, it’s like a second chance.”
The earthquake that hit southeastern Türkiye on February 6, 2023, lasted little more than a minute but caused more than 50,000 deaths. In Adıyaman, 40% of buildings collapsed, and today, about 120,000 of the 267,000 people who live there are in container cities. Like many people in the region, Elanur and Pinar both lost extended family members as well as their housing and jobs.
When the earthquake started, Elanur and her family were in their ninth-floor apartment. They crawled through a window to their balcony, where they waited for the shaking to stop. For 10 days after, they lived in her grandmother’s yard, in a makeshift tent made out of plastic used for gardening.
Similarly, Pinar and her daughters lived outside for four days, then moved into a tent for another two weeks, which provided basic shelter from the constant rain. She says that, though heavily impacted by the earthquake, Adıyaman wasn’t receiving as much attention as other cities. TIDER staff noticed the same thing.
“We saw that Adıyaman was kind of lost,” said Nil Tibukoğlu, TIDER’s general manager. “Nobody was talking about the measure of destruction there.”
After the earthquake, TIDER initially responded as a key member of the Afet Disaster Platform, providing rescue teams in the region with food and tools for reliable communication. The Disaster Platform is a coalition of 68 nonprofit organizations committed to providing holistic crisis support, everything from food and housing to psychological services and even pet rescue. Five associations — TIDER among them — created the Disaster Platform after the 2020 earthquake in Elâzığ.
In the first week, TIDER led Disaster Platform efforts to establish temporary regional warehouses based in Gaziantep and Hatay. From there, teams distributed food, blankets, tents and anything else that those affected and volunteer workers needed in different cities.
TIDER received financial and technical support from The Global FoodBanking Network that helped expand their ability to respond to the disaster appropriately and help people like Elanur and Pinar “They raised $600,000 for us that year,” Nil said, “and that was much more than our budget.” With all of TIDER’s resources focused on earthquake response, GFN helped the organization cover its most essential operating costs, as well as a school feeding program that provided lunch to more than 250 children every day for four months.
“Without GFN’s support, it would have been difficult to pay salaries, the rent of the warehouse, logistics, travel expenses, any of that,” Nil said. “It kept us alive. When you know a community [like GFN] will help you, for us, it was a chance to be brave.”
At the same time they were providing disaster assistance with GFN support, TIDER assessed the needs of the region and planned for sustainable medium- and long-term aid to earthquake-affected communities. And, as resident Pinar noted, overall support in Adıyaman felt inadequate compared to the need, so Nil and her staff made bold plans.
First, TIDER established and operated a temporary warehouse to distribute food and other products. And by April 2023, TIDER had worked with local government to secure a safe, central location to build the Adıyaman Support Market. It had to be a new build, as there weren’t any suitable buildings left standing. The process took about five months, with food company Cargill providing funding for the construction and two years of operation.
The Adıyaman Support Market opened on October 31, 2023, right next to a bus stop to provide easy access. Today it serves about 2,000 people a month. The market is designed so its shoppers have many products to choose from — about 43 currently, from pasta, milk and baking supplies to baby necessities and clothing. Staff members regularly check in with their customers to see if anything should be added to the market’s inventory.
“We believe that the people we serve in Türkiye are not always choosing their lives for themselves,” said Nil. “They’re not choosing anything in life, where they live, what they eat. This is the best way to provide food for them because they can choose for themselves. It’s not our job to choose what they need.”
Pinar said that the Support Market cuts her household’s monthly shopping expenses in half, allowing her to buy books and other educational supplies for her two daughters, ages 12 and 10.
“My kids love pasta, so I get some each time I come here,” she says. “I also get some personal hygiene supplies. It’s a great central location for finding food and other products, and I love what they have here. They have all the products we really need, and it’s been a great support to us.”
For residents of Adıyaman, the Support Market has also become a trusted hub where they can rely on staff members to connect them to services from other organizations.
“We always say that, if the community accepts a food bank, it will become a community center. They come to our food bank now for their other needs, if someone needs a wheelchair, someone needs education, someone needs a different kind of product,” Nil said.
Over the course of the last two years, TIDER and Adıyaman Support Market staff members have heard from the community about one specific need repeatedly.
“Adıyaman wasn’t only impacted physically from the earthquake,” said Melike Çorlak, TIDER project manager. “In addition to losing their homes, people lost their jobs and any job prospects. Many workplaces suffered extensive damage, so people needed basic supplies, but they also needed the support to find jobs.”
Even before the earthquake in 2023, Elanur shouldered a heavy burden, especially for someone so young. In 2020, her mother, Hava Çakır, fell from their apartment’s balcony. Since then, she’s been unable to work, and the responsibility for earning money for the family’s needs has fallen to Elanur. She was only 15 years old when her mother’s accident happened.
Now 20, she continues to take care of her mother and her three siblings, ages 15, 9 and 2 — and that care includes ongoing expenses for her youngest two siblings. “I’m not just working for myself,” she said. “All of this responsibility is mine.”
In 2023, Elanur worked for a hair salon, but that steady employment was erased by the earthquake. For a little more than a year, the family lived in another city, where Elanur found another salon job, but it didn’t pay much or provide health insurance. Her mother wanted to be close to family, so they moved back to Adıyaman, into the government-issued container house in Hope City, in mid-2024. The family of five now makes do with the limited space, sharing one room with a couch, two bunk beds and a kitchenette, as well as a small bathroom.
It’s at that house where Elanur first met Adıyaman Support Market staff, who explained the food bank’s services to the family. After learning more about their situation, the staff members thought Elanur would be a good fit for a TIDER initiative new to Adıyaman.
“Our HR Support program is a digital platform developed to make sure the beneficiaries of food banks can find jobs,” said Melike, who oversees the program. Both job seekers and potential employers can register on the HR Support website. TIDER uses those databases to match the two. As a part of the program, TIDER helps those looking for jobs with resumes and interview preparation. The HR Support program started in 2015 and won GFN’s first-ever Innovation Award in 2017, and in late 2024 its services were expanded to Adıyaman.
“As soon as we opened the food bank, we planned on beginning the HR Support program in Adıyaman, but we didn’t [yet] have enough connections with companies,” Nil said. Now, the Adıyaman Chamber of Commerce, comprised of 47 local businesses, is an official partner of HR Support. TIDER is making sure there are many more partners to come.
And Elanur is the first local HR Support participant — matched to a staff position with TIDER’s own Adıyaman Support Market, which provides not just a steady salary and health insurance but other, intangible benefits: both she and her mother note a remarkable improvement in their mental health thanks to the stability and peace of mind this job brings to their family.
“[Working here] actually changed so many things in my life,” Elanur said. “Here, I’ve learned to have self-confidence and feel strong.” Through her job, Elanur receives career development and other education opportunities. Eventually, she would like to attend university and continue to pursue a nonprofit career.
“Before TIDER, I thought some things weren’t possible. That I couldn’t do this. But right now, I don’t think anything’s impossible for me.”
These days, when Adıyaman Support Market shoppers walk in the door, Elanur still greets shoppers with a smile from the register. After that, she might jump into fine-tuning their resumes.
“Elanur is not only an employee of the market, she’s a supporter of the HR Support program,” Melike said. “She talks to the 1,500 families who [are a part of] this project.” TIDER staff are working to rapidly expand the program and match people who haven’t been able to find work with partner employers, including like Elanur neighbor Pinar.
“Once people join the HR Support program, they no longer need the Support Market,” Melike said. “Our goal is to create a system where nobody needs these markets.”
Kamonlak's Story
By Ahlea Isabella
On a hot and humid day in Thailand, Kristrin Siripaphawee starts the engine of a bright green refrigerated truck, ready to navigate the busy streets of Bangkok. He’ll spend the next five to six hours making at least 15 stops at grocery stores, coffee shops and bakeries. Kristrin is tall with a soft-spoken demeanor, but he navigates central Bangkok’s narrow roads with confidence, weaving between motorbikes and taxis. He has traveled a similar route every Tuesday for the last six months. As he pulls up to each of his many stops, he is greeted by familiar faces from parking and security attendants to employees readying boxes for his arrival.
This is a typical day for Kristrin, a full-time Food Rescue Ambassador at Scholars of Sustenance Thailand (SOS). His role is to pick up donated, surplus food from local retailers then deliver that food to communities across Bangkok.
Forty minutes north, Kamonlak Bootsan pulls up to the Simummuang Market. Kamonlak is in her mid-50s, with her hair pinned back to keep her cool from the sweltering heat. Her green SOS volunteer badge announces her presence to the bustling market. The Simummuang Market is massive — easily filling the space of several football fields, overflowing with stalls, trucks and vendors selling and trading goods from all over the region — but Kamonlak navigates the area with ease. She is here to collect fresh produce donated by farmers, which will then be distributed and used to provide hot meals in her community, just a few miles away in Bang Phun.
For Kristrin, this food recovery and distribution effort is a full-time job. For Kamonlak, it is an act of service.
Kamonlak began her journey as an SOS volunteer in 2020. As of April 2024, she is one of 262 leads in SOS’ Local Volunteer Network, a program that allows community members to lead on food security solutions that will work best for their community’s unique needs.
This program fits naturally with the culture and mindset found throughout Thailand.
“In Thai culture, we believe in always looking out for each other and that people who have less should still have access to what they need,” said Tanaporn Oi-isaranuku, SOS director of operations and communications. While more than 90% of Thailand’s population practices Buddhism, its custom of making “merit,” or doing good deeds, is common among nearly everyone in the country.
“We’re operated by Thai people, and we are really community-based,” said Tanaporn, who has worked at the organization for nine years. “We really engage with community volunteers. We really hear them, what they want and what they need and how we could match their need.”
Many of the people behind SOS’ operations are its young staff members, most in their mid-to-late 20s, who were “looking for [a job] that is not traditional . . .” said Tanaporn, “something that fulfills the soul. Our staff will tell you what they like most about working here is when they can actually physically do something for others.”
This mindset has fueled SOS’ work for years — its staff and volunteers have served more than 5 million people in 4,000 communities since it was founded in 2016.
“I help bring in the good things from outside to our community households … It’s purely volunteer work, purely volunteer spirit,” said Kamonlak, whose volunteer work started in 2004 when she helped launch housing cooperatives for people who needed reliable and affordable housing. Since then, volunteering has become part of her daily life. She is also a village health volunteer and coordinates special projects with the local municipality office.
“People in the community are like brothers and sisters because we came from poverty,” Kamonlak continued. “Whenever we have something, we share it with one another.”
Originally started in Bangkok, there are now four SOS offices across Thailand recovering and distributing food seven days a week. With nearly 10 years of learning and building community relationships, launching the Local Volunteer Network was a natural step for SOS to reach more people and tap into Thailand’s volunteer culture.
Through the Local Volunteer Network, SOS staff train trusted volunteers, like Kamonlak, to pick up donations from nearby food donors, like grocery stores and markets, and distribute it to their communities. This model allows more people to access food more often without SOS needing to hire additional staff, purchase and maintain more trucks or add to the organization’s carbon footprint.
Since launching the Local Volunteer Network in April 2024, SOS has expanded the program to five provinces and plans to add eight more provinces by the end of 2025.
For SOS, this model is about more than organizational and environmental sustainability — it is about ensuring the longevity of food recovery overall. Volunteers are equipped with thorough food safety and handling training; they use their own vehicles to pick up donations and they gradually build relationships with businesses that donate food. “If ever SOS no longer operated, the concept of rescuing food will be there, and people can do it and can learn from it,” said Tanaporn. “We can expand beyond one organization or identity.”
The culture of looking out for one another doesn’t stop at SOS staff and volunteers, but extends to its network of business partners ranging from food retailers to hotels to the Simummuang Market, the largest agricultural distribution center in Thailand.
Simummuang Market, located 40 minutes north of central Bangkok, is home to more than 2,500 vendors and welcomes 30,000 customers every day. In April 2024, SOS and the market started a partnership, providing an easy way for farmers and vendors to donate surplus produce that may not have sold due to minor cosmetic imperfections or simply having more product than needed by the market’s buyers. Throughout the day, vendors drop surplus produce on designated pallets for Kamonlak and two fellow volunteers to pick up and bring back to their neighborhood.
“Right now, we usually have around 230 tons of [food] waste per day,” said Irin Phatraprasit, the market’s organizational development director, recognizing that much of that food is not waste at all. “So, we thought, let’s try to reduce the amount of produce that goes to the landfill as much as possible.”
The market already had a program to turn surplus food into animal feed. Now, market staff leverage their close relationships with farmers and vendors to spread the word about the SOS donation program as another option for surplus produce. The program is currently being piloted in the market’s vegetable truck area, where farmers sell directly from the back of their trucks, but Irin says they hope to expand to other parts of the market where vendors have permanent stalls so more communities like Kamonlak’s can receive food.
Tanaporn says the inspiration for this partnership came from learning about a similar program between fellow GFN member Foodbank Australia and the Sydney Produce Market. In September 2024, more than 40 food bankers toured the Sydney Produce Market during GFN’s Global Summit. Knowledge exchange opportunities like this are a core offering to GFN members in more than 50 countries.
“Being a part of GFN and its Accelerator program has really provided knowledge sharing across the region,” said Tanaporn. “In the Accelerator program, many years ago until now, we have been able to grow partnerships within the country and outside of the country.”
Since 2019, the Accelerator has provided SOS and more than 20 other food banks with tailored training, grants and learning opportunities to advance their food assistance work in areas with high need.
Back in Bang Phun’s open-air community kitchen, Kamonlak and eight volunteers are washing and chopping vegetables, grinding chili peppers and cooking sour soup over a hot stove. The soup will be ready to distribute to neighbors by the time kids get home from school. One volunteer, Janatha Kanya, has even come from a neighborhood three kilometers away to donate her time, despite holding multiple volunteer jobs in her own community.
The raw produce not used to prepare hot meals will be distributed to neighbors to use at home. The group typically cooks a hot meal once a week but will cook more frequently if they have enough donated ingredients. Kamonlak says that the biggest impact of these meals and ingredients is the money saved; community members can save up to 400 baht, about USD$10, per meal that can be saved for other expenses like rent and utilities.
They even make sure to have a cake, donated by a popular Thai bakery, available for birthdays throughout the neighborhood.
“When we call them to pick up food, they smile. Children, the elderly, everyone comes out. And they show up with smiles,” said Kamonlak.
SOS food recovery operations by staff and volunteers run seven days a week, but that’s not stopping the team from thinking about what else they can do to get more food to more people.
At the SOS Bangkok office, a building shared by nine nonprofits, Tanaporn shares proudly that “we are really hands on, and people see that we are real doers.”
Even though the Local Volunteer Network program only started last year, the SOS team is already thinking about ways to expand and improve its operations. Over the next few years, they plan to replace volunteers’ paper tracking system with the Food Warrior App. The app is currently used by Food Rescue Ambassadors (FRAs) like Kristrin to track donation and logistics data in real time. FRAs input everything from food category, weight and temperature to parking challenges at a pick-up location — critical information for ensuring food safety, improving operations and building donor relationships.
In between picking up food donations, managing hot meals at the community kitchen and her many other volunteer roles, Kamonlak is thinking about what’s next, too.
“If you ask me what I’d like to see in the future,” said Kamonlak. “We’ll have more partners who donate food to the community, to the people here. We’ll have good housing, good health and good food.”
Robert's Story
By Chris Costanzo
Just off a main road well north of Nairobi, in the foothills of the Aberdare Mountains, low-slung cinder-block buildings eye each other across a broad dirt lane. Flags atop two spindly tree-trunked poles indicate that this is a site of government activity — the local police station and a county administrative office are located here.
As a village elder in Kamae, the hamlet just down the slope, Robert Chege has been a familiar presence at this site for years, representing the interests of his fellow farmers and villagers in government decision-making. Energetic and charming, Robert — nicknamed Tronic for the small electronics shop he also runs — is a man whom everyone in town knows and trusts.
Not long ago, Robert embraced a new voluntary role in the community: He helps hundreds of small-scale farmers throughout the surrounding area to offload surplus produce they can’t eat or sell, while gaining access to foods they otherwise wouldn’t be able to obtain.
Food Banking Kenya brokers this exchange, working through a facility it built that sits alongside the government buildings and is known locally as the produce depot. The depot addresses a cruel irony of food insecurity: while there is enough food to feed everyone, it’s not always available in places where the people who need it can get it. In Kenya, for example, 40% of the food produced — worth $655 million — is wasted each year, as about 37% of the population goes food insecure.
In a place like Kamae, where most everyone has a small plot of land to cultivate, certain types of food are almost always in abundance, like the cabbage, kale and potatoes that grow well in the area’s cool climate. At the depot, Robert takes in donations of this surplus food, recording them in a small notebook, as villagers arrive with bundles of food carried on their backs, bikes, motorcycles, wheelbarrows and donkeys. On a recent day in January, he documented six donations, including one of 140 pounds (64 kilograms) of cabbage and another of 33 pounds (15 kilograms) of potatoes. Day after day, the donations add up.
A couple of times a week, Food Banking Kenya sends a vehicle up to this mountainous region to collect all the food that Robert has gathered and bring it back to Nairobi where food insecurity is acute and the fresh produce can go to good use. At the same time, the food bank drops off items that Robert’s fellow farmers could use, like rice, cooking oil and flour, or vegetables that are not easily grown in the region, such as squash or maize.
The scene at the produce depot is a microcosm of a scenario that plays out along the farming supply chain all over Africa and the world. Globally, between 33% and 40% of all food is wasted as it moves from farm to fork. Of that, about 15% is lost on farms during and after harvests. “Food is in plenty here,” Robert said, describing the fertile region where he lives. The produce depot “is a place where we can take the food so that it can help people instead of going bad.”
The produce depot in Kamae, shaped like a small shipping container, has become a blueprint for three others Food Banking Kenya has since built, and it wants to build more. A grant from The Rockefeller Foundation to The Global FoodBanking Network to support 13 food banks in 10 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America will help Food Banking Kenya construct its next depot.
Through the grant funding, which overall aims to address food insecurity and reduce food waste, Food Banking Kenya is also expanding its ability to store and transport produce. It has purchased a refrigerated van, added refrigeration to an existing van, and added a chest freezer to its warehouse to store protein recovered from retailers. It has also built a solar dehydrator near the Kamae depot to dry out fresh produce, making it easier to store and transport while still retaining its nutrient density. So far, the funding has helped the food bank increase its agricultural recovery by 79%.
Such capacity building is necessary, especially because the food bank also has relationships with large-scale growers and food packers who provide it with donations of surplus produce, up to six tons at a time. All in all, agricultural recovery makes up more than 90% of the food bank’s sourcing, an approach that helps reduce food waste and its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, while also providing nutritious food to people who need it. Eighty percent of the food bank’s distributions go to children, with the remaining going to the elderly.
While infrastructure is critical for handling produce, Robert has proven that a personal touch is paramount when it comes to sourcing. Harnessing the power of a network, Robert has trained about 10 other farmers throughout the county to also mobilize farmers in their areas to contribute surplus produce. His efforts have helped expand the number of small-scale farmers contributing to the produce depot from 200 to 600. “I use a motorbike or a bicycle,” Robert said. “That’s what I use to spread the information. I talk to them on the farms and tell them all to come.”
The food bank’s network of small-scale farmers is set to expand even further as it amplifies Robert’s method of grassroots outreach. It has already identified another farmer in a neighboring county whom it hopes will be as impactful as Robert in marshaling local farmers to donate their surplus produce. “We’ve seen that having a farmer actually go around and talk to the others has proven to be very effective,” said John Gathungu, co-founder and executive director of Food Banking Kenya.
Gathungu planted the seed of this still-expanding network back in 2016 when he noticed an imbalance between the hunger he witnessed in Nairobi, where he had moved as a young adult, and the bounty of produce he knew existed in the mountainous region near Robert’s village, where John’s parents owned property. An overabundance of carrots at his parents’ house one day prompted him to bring a supply of the vegetable back to Nairobi, to share with his city neighbors. Soon, the vegetable transports were becoming more frequent, and the distributions more formal. John was running a food bank without really knowing it.
Now Food Banking Kenya serves tens of thousands of school children through relationships with more than 50 organizations including schools and orphanages. In 2023, it distributed nearly 635,849 kilograms of food throughout 13 counties, serving 66,000 people. Its membership in The Global FoodBanking Network has helped Food Banking Kenya gain technical assistance and knowledge. It was through a visit last year with Leket Israel, a fellow member of The Global FoodBanking Network member, that John observed the importance of nurturing close relationships with a vast community of farmers. “I realized this was an approach we could use,” he said.
On a recent Friday at the food bank’s warehouse, various organizations arrived to pick up food to take back and distribute to the people they serve. Margaret Nekesa, the founder and director of Smile Community Centre, which houses 80 orphaned and vulnerable children in southeastern Nairobi, had rented a car to transport all the food she would receive to take back to her charity.
It did not seem possible that the towering crates of fresh produce that were wheeled out of the food bank’s cooler would fit into the car. It was a modestly sized car, and the columns of fresh produce, some of it retrieved just the day before from the depot, stretched high above everyone’s heads. But little by little, all the produce was transferred into large, nearly bursting mesh bags that were then loaded into the vehicle.
By the end of the day, the large cooler was empty and all the produce was out in the community. That’s just the way John likes it, to be ready for the next cycle of agriculture recovery and redistribution that would start again on Monday.
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More Than Food Recipe Collection
Food banks know how to get quality food into the hands of the people who need it most. And with the right resources, they can do even more than serve food.
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