Hy-Line Sustainability: Fighting hunger in South Africa
By: Hy-Line continues its partnership with Blessman International in Mokopone, South Africa. In October, we celebrated World Egg Day 2023 with the children of the Blessman feeding outreach. The children enjoy an ‘egg a day’ with their regular meals provided by Blessman International, produced by their local Hy-Line Silver Brown commercial flock.
The children donned their Hy-Line International World Egg Day shirts and smiled for photos. To further the outreach, the Blessman team expanded the local feeding program to feed a previously unreached school in the nearby rural area which is known to have a high level of food insecurity.
Recently, Blessman launched a feeding program with these children, adding a double ration of two eggs each day, and with the help of the University of Iowa and the University of Venda of South Africa, a health study is in place to track the progress of the children under the new, improved feeding regime. Early feedback from the teachers is that the these children are responding very positively with increased energy, better focus on their studies, improved behavior and most of all, attendance is greatly improved as the school is able to offer these consistent meals.
By mid 2024, we will have formal results on the effectiveness of the feeding program and be able to share data on the benefits of daily egg consumption in the effort to combat malnutrition.
Low egg consumption and undernourishment plague most of Africa. Average per-capita egg consumption is reported to be less than an egg per week for the continent overall, which severely lags worldwide consumption figures of nearly 4 eggs per week. The egg is an essential tool to solving the problem of malnourishment on the continent. Better accessibility to eggs and overall promotion of egg health benefits are needed to bring African consumers to reach worldwide consumption levels.
Hy-Line and Blessman International are doing our part to demonstrate the value of the egg and hope that data collected from this study will allow for further expansion of the use of eggs in the group’s already existing national feeding program, which reaches some 60,000 children in the country today.
26 March 2025
4
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