From hunger to hope, a non-profit's mission to fill empty bellies of the poor in KL
From the brink of hunger to the beacon of hope – unearthing Kechara's relentless quest against poverty and food waste in Kuala Lumpur on World Food Day.
KUALA LUMPUR – When they first embarked on their philanthropic mission, Kechara’s aim was simple. Feed the homeless. Sate their hunger. Quench their thirst. Lend them warmth and kindness.
But over time, as the non-profit get to know more about the life of the hungry frequenting their soup kitchen, an unnerving motif in the disturbing tapestry of Kuala Lumpur’s societal tragedies began to unravel.
Kechara discovered that the root of such predicament, plaguing the city’s most unfortunate and downtrodden, stemmed from a childhood of almost-always-empty bellies and primal pangs of hunger.
“It’s like a domino effect,” was how Kechara’s marketing director Justin Cheah put it in an exclusive interview with Sinar Daily.
Having little to eat daily, the children of the poor were constantly hungry.
This made them unable to focus on school, resulting them not being able to do well and ultimately, most dropped out, earning nothing in terms of academic qualification.
“Eventually, when they need to work, they ended up doing odd jobs which pays peanuts. Many are unwilling to work far from home for slightly better pay because travel costs would either offset or eat a huge chunk of their take home pay.
“When they get married and have children, they have to work two or three jobs just to barely make ends meet. If they have many children, then those children will likely grow up in the same vicious cycle,” Cheah explained.
And this was a crisis that cannot be resolved by a mere soup kitchen.
In wanting to at the very least, ease their suffering, Kechara diversified its altruistic operations. They established a food bank, in 2012, to collect groceries that will be given to the needy once every six weeks.
This roughly translates between eight to nine deliveries a year.
“We did research involving 10,000 individuals and found out that 80 per cent of those who are homeless are school dropouts and that 79 per cent of them were from poor families suffering from improper upbringing and inadequate access to food.
“We realised that aside from a soup kitchen, we need to have a food bank to address the root of the problem faced by the poor so that we can at least give them more disposable income,” Cheah said.
Rice, cooking oils, flour, instant oat, sugar, milk powder, dry/instant noodle, chocolate-based drink and canned food are the usual components of Kechara’s giveaways to over 3,000 families comprising of the urban poor and Orang Asli across the country.
Initially, each of Kechara’s food parcels would have an RM200 worth of groceries but dwindling donations, rising inflation, and soaring cost of living have all but reduced the monetary allocation to RM150 per parcels.
“Everything slowed down after Covid 19. People are still reeling from the aftermath. If before they would donate RM3 of their RM10; now they would only donate 50 sen,” Cheah lamented on the looming food shortage for the poor.
The irony of impoverished families struggling to put food on their plates is evident against the backdrop of the massive amount of food waste generated daily in Malaysia.
In 2022, the Solid Waste and Public Cleansing Management Corporation (SWCorp) reported that 44 per cent of the 38,000 tonnes solid waste generated were food waste.
Mathematically, this meant that Malaysians dumped 16,720 tonnes of food per day in 2022.
Now, it’s worth noting that each of the Petronas Twin Towers weighed in at approximately 300,000 tonnes. Now juxtapose this against the fact that Malaysia generated a staggering 501,600 tonnes of food waste monthly.
“I agree. It is indeed weird,” Cheah concurred when such irony was brought up in the interview.
He also weighed in that the figure by SWCorp may not reflect the true extent of the food waste situation in the country, believing that it could just be a “pessimistic number.”
At first glance, these twin issues – food insecurity and food wastage – might seem to be able to counterbalance one another.
How, so? According to Cheah's proposal, it hinges on government support.
“Food banks like ours have neither the funding nor the manpower to collect leftovers from restaurants, café and eateries, so that it can be redistributed to the poor. Thousands of tonnes of food are dumped every day, we can feed a lot impoverished families with that.
“If the government can cover the manpower costs of picking up unsold ready-to-eat foods, then non-profits like us handle the salvation of those food waste and funnelled it to the poor the needy instead.
“Imagine how much good will it be for the country, if we have such a holistic system. It’ll benefit the businesses too as they can cut their waste management costs, which are quite expensive,” Cheah remarked.
