More than six in ten South African households experience food insecurity, according to the National Food and Nutrition Security Survey cited by the South African Human Rights Commission, with the Eastern Cape among the hardest hit.Three years into a partnership formed to address exactly that problem, the Lingham Foundation, SA Harvest, FNB and the Maria Marina Foundation have built an Early Childhood Development centre now serving 120 children daily in Cwebeni, trained 40 local women as ECD teachers, funded a community centre built with local labour, and contributed to the delivery of over 46 million meals to vulnerable South Africans.
Among the recommendations in the SAHRC’s 2023 provincial inquiry into child malnutrition in the Eastern Cape was extending nutrition support to early childhood development centres, the same gap this partnership’s Cwebeni centre was built to close.
The work sits within SA Harvest’s wider national programme, which has delivered more than 100 million meals since 2019 at a cost of R0.90 per meal. It began with the Nutrition Bucket campaign with Daily Maverick, which raised over R2 million in under two weeks and reached more than 2,000 families in the Pondoland region. From that campaign, a longer-term programme was built across two communities: Missionvale, outside Gqeberha, and Cwebeni, a remote rural community outside Port St Johns.
In Missionvale, a township outside Gqeberha founded 32 years ago by an Irish nun who arrived believing it was an animal shelter, SA Harvest runs its Nelson Mandela Bay food rescue and redistribution network through the Missionvale Care Centre, connecting surplus food from farms, retailers and manufacturers to families, schools and shelters across the region. The centre also runs a greenhouse, a thrift store with a recycling token exchange programme, a clinic, and skills development and job readiness training for young people.
Their stories are among those captured in More Than a Meal, a five-episode documentary series that gives its cameras to the people living inside this ecosystem rather than an outside narrator. In the opening episode, Missionvale: Where Hope Lives, viewers meet Baba, 17, who has learned enough about food security at the centre to decide he wants to become a farmer, not because it is his only option, but because he has come to understand it as one of the most important things a person can do. Lona, a culinary student at the same centre, describes the kitchen team as the engine of the community, and says she arrived without confidence and now speaks in front of large groups without hesitation.
In Cwebeni, accessible only by off-road travel, the partnership has helped build a water filtration system, PureFlow Amanzi, reaching more than 15,000 people, and an Early Childhood Development centre attended daily by 120 children. Ithemba Kuluntu, led by TJ and Anke through their organisation Timbaku, is now SA Harvest’s official feeding partner in the Pondoland region. Their account features in the series’ Cwebeni episodes, which trace how the ECD centre and greenhouse were built and the gratitude of a team that spent years waiting for support that matched the scale of the need.
“For years we had organisations come through and promise things that never materialised,” says TJ, co-founder of Ithemba Kuluntu and Timbaku. “The difference with SA Harvest was that they walked into the villages on foot, and the conversation became something different.”
Over three years, the partnership has:
- built an Early Childhood Development centre now serving 120 children daily in Cwebeni
- trained 40 women from the local community as ECD teachers, in a region where child-headed households number in the thousands
- funded a community centre in Cwebeni, built with local labour
- distributed 3,094 safe water systems, reaching more than 15,000 people through the PureFlow Amanzi project
- contributed to the delivery of over 46 million meals to vulnerable South Africans
In Missionvale, a community-built incentive system called Missionvale Care Centre Bucks allows residents to earn points for participating in community programmes and redeem them for groceries, furniture and training. In Cwebeni’s Sparrow Day Care, children with autism and cerebral palsy have gone on to complete matric and university, supported by caregivers who operate with almost no formal resources.
“What I have witnessed in the Eastern Cape over three years is what becomes possible when investment is sustained long enough to allow what communities are already building to grow into something lasting,” says Charlene Lingham, Co-Founder of the Lingham Foundation.
“The Eastern Cape shows what’s possible when a partnership stays in place long enough for a community’s own plans to take shape. What started as food rescue in Missionvale and a single centre in Cwebeni has grown into water infrastructure, early childhood development and a feeding network communities can rely on, and that’s the return on patient funding we want to see replicated across the province,” says Ozzy Nel, CEO of SA Harvest.
Even so, organisers are clear that the scale of the Eastern Cape’s food insecurity outstrips what any single partnership can address. The FoodForward SA and UCT research found that employment shocks and rising food prices remain the strongest drivers of household hunger in the province, and that cash transfers have cushioned but not offset the impact.
The Lingham Foundation, co-founded by South African-born entrepreneurs Charlene and Vinny Lingham, operates between California and South Africa and funds work across food security, education, sustainability and collaborative impact. Its partnership with SA Harvest reflects a long-term commitment to community-led development in South Africa.
The Foundation has documented this work through More Than a Meal, a five-episode documentary series filmed across Missionvale and Cwebeni that features Baba, Lona, TJ and Anke, and the caregivers, community leaders and young people whose lives are woven through every episode.
