Growing Health - Fighting Malnutrition in Rwanda

“Medicine without food is poison” – Dr. Innocent, Kabutare District Hospital

Our Story 

In 2013, a pediatrician (Dr.Emily Esmaili) and a nurse ( Medie Jesena Parrott, RN, MSN, MPH)working at University Teaching Hospital of Butare, or CHUB, noticed that the children in the hospital were not getting better in spite of the medicine they were receiving. They realized that their patients were not eating because the hospital did not have money in its budget to feed them. . CHUB is a large government referral hospital, so many patients live several hours away, and their families cannot afford to buy food at the hospital. As a result, some patients struggle with malnutrition and have trouble fighting their illnesses. The average hospital stay at CHUB is 16 days and the mortality rate in this setting is over 6%. To address the problem, the doctors teamed up with local Rwandans to start the NGO Growing Health Inc, or Kuzamura Ubuzima (KU) in Kinyarwanda.

What We Do

Today, Growing Health has a 10-acre farm adjacent to CHUB. Every day, our staff use organically grown food from the farm to prepare two nutritious meals for over 110 patients at CHUB and 15 breastfeeding mothers at nearby Kabutare District Hospital. Eventually, we hope to be able to feed all 300+ patients at CHUB and the remaining 100+ patients at Kabutare District Hospital. Our ultimate goal is to have our model adopted by the government and implemented in hospitals across Rwanda. However, for now, we rely almost entirely on private donations for support.

In addition to providing meals, we also teach our patients about nutrition, wellness, and sustainable agriculture in order to promote healthy lifestyles and prevent malnutrition or hospitalization in the future. According to the Rwanda Demographic and Health Survey 2014-2015, 38% of Rwandan children aged 1-5 years are stunted, indicating chronic malnutrition. 20% of households were food-insecure. We hope to give our beneficiaries the education and knowledge they need to escape the cycle of poverty and malnutrition.  

We grow most of the food that we serve our beneficiaries. However, we have no choice but to buy some of the other food items we use to cook nutritious meals, such as oil, salt, rice, and eggs. We also need to buy the firewood that we use to cook and the water that we use to irrigate our farm. In addition to these daily expenses, we must also replace old farm and kitchen tools, purchase educational materials, buy seeds for new crops, purchase materials for organic pesticides, and more. We rely on donations to supply the funds for these essential expenses and pay our staff (entirely made up of Rwandans) so that we can continue to supply our patients with meals and education every day. 

Help Us Fight Malnutrition 

Food can save a patient’s life. A donation of just $10 can feed a patient for 10 days. Every dollar counts in the fight against malnutrition.

Click here to hear from some of our beneficiaries about how Growing Health has helped them.

Visit our website to learn more about our project.