To cushion the effect of food insecurity in the society and provide succour to the indigent, Committee of Friends For Humanity, (COFFAH) has fed over five hundred less privileged people including men, women and children in Lagos.
The event which came under the theme: ‘COFFAH Food Day”, took place at Fountain Gardens illupeju. It was also an opportunity for the members of COFFAH who were drawn from various professions to brainstorm on how best to render more selfless service to humanity.
Speaking at the programme, president of the organisation, Nkechi Ali Balogun, affirmed that the idea behind COFFAH Food Day was conceived during the pandemic to assist the government in providing food for the needy.
Explaining further, Ali Balogun said: “During Covid-19, we looked around us in response to the needs, in response to the hunger around us, we look at ways to mitigate and one of those ways was the idea of sharing food items to the needy. Since then we have not looked back. The first one we had was in Surulere, we fed over one thousand, this is about the 3rd edition.’’ MEMAIL
“We really don’t have much as a non- governmental organisation, even with the little we have, we also have built hospitals, given hospital beds.
‘’Another initiative is COFFAH Helping Hands. With this initiative, we raise money among ourselves, go to hospitals and pay bills for patients who could not afford to pay their hospital bills’’.
On the other hand, she stressed the need for partnership between the government and her organisation so that the food sharing outreach among the needy would be a regular exercise.
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Such partnership she said would go a long way in mitigating whatever hardship people are going through.
On her part, the immediate past president of COFFAH, Carolyn Ufere, affirmed that the Food Day outreach was part of the vision of her organisation which according to her is enhancing the lives of the less privileged in the society.
Ufere who is also the founder of the organisation recalled that few years back COFFAH partnered Google Nigeria to train about 100 small scale businesswomen on digital skills to grow their businesses.
These women, she said had their businesses registered on google search and are constantly monitored and evaluated in order to ascertain their progress in their various businesses.
Similarly, one of the past presidents of COFFAH, Christy Okoye stressed the need for government and well -meaning Nigerians to come to the aid of the down trodden particularly now that the cost of living is becoming unbearable.
Some of the beneficiaries who spoke during the outreach, lauded the organisers of the programme for remembering them in such capacity.
