The Kiandutu slum north of Nairobi and has 60,000-plus residents. It covers 120 acres. 3-5% of the families are headed by single women. The AIDS rate has declined from 7% to 5% (the last two figures are probably inaccurate).

At least one child dies a day. Most common causes are pneumonia, diarrhoea and malaria. Parents don’t know how to take care of their children. They need food, clothing, health care and mosquito nets.

The biggest problem is unemployment, which leads to a lack of food. Some parents give their children alcohol to help them sleep at night. Most parents are illiterate, many no longer even look for work and many are single parents. They do casual labour in gardens or washing clothes.

Rents are 200-400 Kenyan shillings

(£1.56 to £3.12) a month.

2 shillings for a 10 litre water container and 3 shillings for 20 litres of water, they cook with charcoal, firewood and kerosene.

2 kg of charcoal costs 20 shillings

and a bag of charcoal is 650 shillings

Maize is 54 shillings per kilogram — and the price is going up. A card to see a doctor costs 80 shillings.

Sabina has a tired, worn face. When we walked into the compound, Allen was lying next to her, all bundled up. His hair was curly and thin. His eyes large and dark in his face. His cheekbones were pronounced and he was listless and limp. He was suffering from severe malnutrition and after a medical examination we were told had we not helped he would have died within two weeks.

1 year old ALLEN MWASYA and his Grandmother SABINA ZAUMI.

No one knows who Allen’s father is. His mother, an alcoholic, disappeared and left her mother with five young children to care for. Her mother is a widow, her husband having died five years earlier. She has absolutely no way to take care of five small children. She also has one child, a 15-year-old son, of her own to care for. The children are Sabina (7); Susan (4); Moses (2.5); Julius (2.5) and Allen (1 year).

Allen has been sick for a while. He was in the hospital in July, suffering from rickets, severe pneumonia and severe dehydration. After his hospital stay, his weight started dropping rapidly. What child wouldn’t be malnourished when all he has to eat is water with a little rice? The grandmother told us that the day before we arrived, she had porridge, but she had given it to the other children, not Allen. There wasn’t enough for all of them.

Allen has never even tasted milk. He weighed just 3.5 kilos, or about 7 pounds and at a year old he is supposed to weigh at least 8 kilos. He had severe anemia and iron deficiency. They live in a house built by the community. Her teenage son painted the cheerful yellow and white pictures on the wall. The family survives on hand-outs from well-wishers and neighbours.

When we saw Allen we bought some high nutrition food so that Sabina could make Allen some porridge. The next day we arranged for him to be taken to a centre where he will be given medical care as well as nourishing food to build him up and when we went to meet him with just two high nutrition meals inside him he was a little more alert.

A very happy, healthy Allen two

weeks after receiving our help.

Relieving Kenya's urban poverty

Kibera, the second largest slum in East Africa, on the outskirts of Nairobi, is home to over 1 million people.  There is no electricity supply, no mains water, drainage or services of any kind.  It is estimated that there are more than 50,000 orphans, many of them due to HIV/Aids.

Feed The Children's work in Kenya includes:

Emergency aid - support in Kenya's drought

People who depend on annual rains for their livelihood are in desperate straits when rain is late, or doesn't fall at all.

In the spring of 2006, rain had not fallen for months in the northern Kenya.  An area that should have been green had turned to desert.  The semi-nomadic population had lost around 70% of livestock, and faced starvation.

Feed The Children provided food, water and other essentials to the 10,000 people living around Kargi, a remote village in northern Kenya.

Click here for a video report - low resolution for dial-up connections

Click here for a video report - high resolution for broadband

Abandoned babies

A tragic number of Kibera's babies is left in hospitals, police stations and even on rubbish dumps.  Feed The Children's Abandoned Baby Centre (ABC) cares for around 65 babies at a time; on arrival, they are typically undersized, malnourished and ill.  After a few weeks of good food and appropriate medical care, however, most of the babies make a full return to health.

Where possible, the babies will return to their parents or extended families, with support from Feed The Children.  Others are fostered within the community, or occasionally, may be adopted overseas.  

Children with special needs usually progress to the Dagoretti Children's Centre, on the same site.

Sadly, some babies arrive at ABC too late, and cannot recover - for them, the hospice facility at least offers them loving care for the whole of their short lives.

Children with disabilities

Dagoretti Children's Centre is a residential school, providing for around 45 children with special needs.  At Dagoretti, children can receive treatments such as speech therapy or physiotherapy, and any mobility aids they require, such as wheelchairs or prosthetic limbs.

Support to schools

The Urban Feeding Programme, in conjunction with the United Nations World Food Programme, supports 99 schools in Kibera, providing a mid-day meal for around 90,000 children.  For many of the children, this will be the only meal of the day.

Alongside providing essential food, our de-worming programme helps children get maximum nutrition from their diet.  It costs just 40p to keep a child free from worms for a year.