Laudium NPO teach students how to bake
"Due to the poor quality of food that underprivileged children receive, they wake up hungry in the middle of the night and that bothered me."
Knead Bakery is a registered NPO from Laudium, Centurion, that teaches interested students how to bake.
According to its founder, Spiwe Manqamane, the organisation is assisted and run by the Al Fidaa Foundation, and Light of the Needy.
“We offer baking courses to underprivileged women in the Pretoria community free of charge. They bake pineapple-themed cakes, challah bread, do royal icing, make lemon meringue pies, cupcakes, ginger biscuits and a classic madeira cake as well.
“We teach a four-week long baking course, and products range from cakes to biscuits and pastry products. We also teach marketing techniques and aspects of cost, in order to equip them to start their own business.”
He said due to the poor quality of food that underprivileged children received, they woke up hungry in the middle of the night and that bothered him.
“At times we feel it would be better if someone adopted these children, so as to give them a chance in life.
“For child-headed households the daily diet consists of white bread and a carton of cheap juice or sugar water, known locally as the ‘poppie water diet’.”
He said their lives took a turn for the worst, because the prices of basic goods continued to rise.
“Eastern Cape Beans and samp are our normal food but we cannot cook this because it uses too much electricity. Wood that was freely available in our area, no longer is, and now we have to buy it.”
According to Manqamane, the Al Fidaa Foundation that they have partnered with, is a registered non-profit organisation formed in August 2008 to assist the needy in the Eastern Cape.
“Their ambition is to assist the impoverished of all demographics and creed. As far back as 2013 activists marched to the offices of the department in Bisho, Eastern Cape, demanding that the department urgently address the issues it had ignored for so many years.
“These issues, as outlined at the time in a publication called Death and Dying in the Eastern Cape, were identified through ongoing monitoring of the health system in the province by nearly 20 organisations that are part of the Eastern Cape Health Crisis Action Coalition (ECHCAC).
“The report detailed a litany of health rights violations that frequently resulted in death as children were eating wild plants to survive when the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown regulations took its toll. We apply this knowledge locally.”
He said the number of households going hungry had doubled, according to new research.
“A woman recently told me her children can tell the taste of every plant in their area, as for the last three months she has been feeding them plants.”
Research according to the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) and Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey (NIDS-CRAM) released recently, he said, found that 47% of people reported that their households ran out of money to buy food in April 2020.
“Before the lockdown, 21% of households reported that they ran out of money to buy food the previous year. Pandemic-induced job losses present a major threat to the livelihoods of a large proportion of grant-receiving households.”
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