The One Bread Project Update
As many of you already know, The One Bread Project is our signature school feeding program.
When it originally started in 2020, we were serving about 440 students daily near our bakery in Gicumbi, thanks to a generous donation from The Abbott Fund. Since then we have exponentially increased our reach because of the enthusiastic support we received from Bakery Equipment Manufacturers and Allieds (BEMA) members and Council of Manufacturing Associations (CMA) members! For the first half of 2021 we served an average of about 3,000 students daily which jumped up to over 6,000 students each day by the start of Q4. Not only are we now able to serve more students, but more of our team members can contribute to this program as we are now serving schools around our bakeries in Kigali and Ruyenzi, too!
Since the start of The One Bread Project, our Social Impact team has been busy with collecting data to see if our bread makes a difference in reducing hunger and school dropout rates, in addition to improving overall student performance. Our surveys are shared with the teachers and the headmasters of our school participants at the start of our bread delivery services to collect baseline data, and then quarterly thereafter to measure our impact. Our most recent pieces of data were collected as a follow up survey in late October to early November 2021 from six different schools.
The results of our survey were overwhelmingly positive! See what our teachers had to say:
99.6% of teachers responded that students reported being less hungry when asked if they believe that having regular bread provided during school has decreased hunger among students.
99.6% of teachers reported improvement in student attentiveness after observing how students were more engaged in comparison to their attentiveness in class prior to our bread deliveries.
100% of teachers believe that bread serves as a positive incentive for students to attend school regularly.
What is even more remarkable is that teachers noted a dramatic increase in student performance after receiving bread daily. In October*, teachers were asked baseline questions to assess how well students were performing on class assessments, measured by students achieving a grade of 75% or higher. During a follow up in November, teachers were asked whether they had observed marked improvement in student’s academic performance after receiving daily bread. The teachers in Kigali unanimously agreed that our bread made a difference in classroom performance, while 99% of teachers in Gicumbi and 89% of teachers in Ruyenzi felt the same way.
While these results speak for themselves, nothing beats the testimonials we have heard from the students directly! A primary student in Ruyenzi shared with us that “Bread helps to motivate us and level up interactions during class because we are not hungry.”
As we head into the second half of the 2021-2022 school year, we are on the path to joining hands with more schools for The One Bread Project. This is all thanks to the generosity of our community of supporters and The Abbott Fund. Interested in learning more about The One Bread Project? Reach out to us by obp@womensbakery.com today!
*The baseline survey at the start of the 2021-2022 school year was conducted in October due to the Covid-related delayed start of the school year.