They used to beg for coins on the streets of Maiduguri. Today, they line up for morning assembly, reciting the alphabet in voices that stumble but do not break. Their uniforms may be worn, their classrooms bare, yet there’s a quiet rhythm of order here, a discipline born of hunger, now gently fed.
The Feed for Life Foundation began with a simple, stubborn idea: no child should have to choose between food and learning. From a few bowls of rice, it has grown into an institution serving over 800 children, each one a survivor of a war that tried to erase their future. Based in the North-east, where insurgency once silenced laughter, the Orphan Academy now hums with it.
Yetunde Abimbola-Alebiosu, the founder, speaks with the calm conviction of someone who has seen both despair and defiance. She started Feed for Life in 2014, when displaced families filled the camps and children scavenged for food. Her answer was to build a space where the mind could feed as well as the body. Since then, the foundation has served more than 800,000 meals and opened a secondary school to keep hope alive beyond the basics.
The Orphan Academy sits in the dust and heat, without enough desks, sometimes without a roof. But every morning, the children still come. They sit on mats, clutching borrowed books, their faces bright with questions. One teacher said they no longer run when they hear loud sounds; they have learned to stay put, to trust that the world won’t always fall apart.
Feed for Life now hopes to raise funds for new classrooms, for proper shelter and furniture. It’s a modest goal in global terms, just £30,000. But in this corner of Borno, it could mean the difference between learning in the rain and learning in safety.
And perhaps that’s the quiet miracle of Maiduguri: that amid the wreckage, someone, namely, Abimbola-Alebiosu, still believes in blackboards, in rice, in the slow, radical act of teaching a child to dream.
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