Given Hapunda

198 Executive summary Background Nutrition feeding programmes are regarded as appropriate interventions to improve poor nutritional status, health and well-being, as well as reduce hunger on the children. This assists to reduce malnutrition and cognitive development interruption. The South African government has introduced feeding programmes at schools, however not in pre-schools. Joint Aid Management (JAM) saw a need for the intervening at the pre-school level by introducing a feeding programme in South Africa. The organisation provided non-commercial fortified sorghum-based meal. Sorghum has been used in Africa and Asia to alleviate food insecurity, hunger and malnutrition as it contains essential nutrients needed by the body, such as macronutrients (starch, protein and fat), B vitamins (thiamin, riboflavin, pyridoxine), liposoluble vitamins A, D, E and K, and minerals (phosphorus, potassium, iron and zinc). Sorghum is considered to be one of the staple foods, used to produce porridge for children because it has resistant starch, which weakens digestibility, especially for infants when compared with other staple foods such as maize and wheat (Queiroz et al ., 2015; Dicko et al ., 2005; De Mesa-Stonestreet et al ., 2010). Figure 1 show the sorghum plant and sorghum bran. Figure 1: The sorghum plant and sorghum bran (Rampho, 2005; Siddique, 2013). Purpose and objectives The purpose of this study was to measure the impact of a feeding programme on the nutritional status of pre-school children in order to give feedback to JAM. Therefore, JAM contacted the Centre of Sustainable Livelihood (CSL) at Vaal University of Technology (VUT) to evaluate the impact of the feeding programme in order to analyse if it had an impact. Therefore pre-analyses were conducted, then the feeding programme was implemented for a period of ten months, after which the post-analyses were conducted to determine the impact sorghummeal had on the nutritional status of pre-school children. This