On its seventh birthday, which falls on World Food Day 2026, SA Harvest launches its school holiday campaign calling on South Africans to help ensure food reaches families when school feeding programmes are unavailable.
SA Harvest was founded on 16 October 2019, the same day the world marks World Food Day each year. In seven years, the organisation has rescued more than 25 million kilograms of safe, edible surplus food and enabled over 120 million meals through a national food rescue and redistribution network operating across Gauteng, the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape.
On its seventh birthday, SA Harvest is marking World Food Day 2026 under the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ theme “Innovate today. Nourish tomorrow” by launching its school holiday campaign, “Don’t let hunger rule the holidays.” The campaign addresses a predictable and significant food access gap: when schools close, the feeding programmes that provide daily nutrition for children from food-insecure households close with them.
At the centre of the campaign is the Bucket of Nutrition, a practical and tangible way for individuals, families and businesses to contribute. A contribution of R1,000 sponsors a Bucket of Nutrition that enables a family of four to access food for four weeks through SA Harvest’s established redistribution network, at an average cost of R1.20 per meal. The bucket moves through SA Harvest’s food safety controls, cold chain logistics and vetted community partner network to reach families at the point when the school programmes they depend on are unavailable.
“Seven years ago, SA Harvest was built on a conviction that South Africa’s food access challenge was a logistics problem rather than a supply problem,” says Ozzy Nel, CEO of SA Harvest. “Over 120 million meals later, that conviction has been tested at scale. This World Food Day, we are asking South Africans to help us ensure that the families who depend on school feeding programmes do not face a food access gap when the schools close.”
Contributions to the school holiday campaign can be made at saharvest.org.
