Education & nutrition for children in Peru

The first harvest in our fully-irrigated Plan Huerto is underway in Perú with the vegetables being used for meals for the children and the elderly. We are still in the trial period to find out which vegetables grow well in the desert conditions and have started hydroponic systems for herbs and strawberries.

This boost to the students' food programme adds to the daily fruit and gas to cook the limited governmental food that we already provide. We will also be able to share the harvests with the elderly members of the community to make sure they can eat regularly.

Academic work continues and the local teachers have done astounding work to try to bring the children back to the level of education they should be at after missing two years of teaching. There is still much to be done though major strides have been made.

This year The Phoenix Projects are celebrating twenty years in Latin America and thanks to you around five thousand children, teenagers and adults have been able to receive a quality education during this time in Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Perú and previously in Brazil, Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

We have built schools, extra classrooms, kitchens and energy efficient stoves, provided employment for dozens of local people, planted hundreds of thousands of trees, distributed educational materials, daily meals and hundreds of tonnes of fruit and implemented sustainable income plans on an average annual budget of around $100,000/£85,000.

Additionally, over three hundred families have benefitted from the implementation of sustainable income plans including cows, chickens, weaving, vegetables and small businesses.

To celebrate our 20^th Anniversary we are launching this year’s Appeal today and all donations up to $50/£40 through this page will be matched at 50% by GlobalGiving between Monday 12th September - today - until Friday 16^th September. Larger donations can of course be made although the matching will only apply to the first $50/£40 and only once per individual donor.

We still have so much more we want to do over the coming years with the experience we have gained, including replicating the projects in other communities with sustainable plans covering running costs from the start.

Your continued support in helping to fund local teachers’ salaries and scholarships, school materials, food and sustainable income plans is as important now as it has been in the last twenty years.

We realise that times are uncertain though anything you can donate to the Appeal through this page this week to take advantage of the 50% matching will help us start the next twenty years in the best possible way!

Thank you so much in advance.