Mary's Meals, an NGO that develops school feeding projects in 18 countries around the world, has been awarded the 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for Concord. The jury has praised its "imaginative and effective" model to optimize resources and provide every day feeding more than two million children in areas affected by the food crisis and has decided to reward the organization "for its exemplary dedication to alleviating some of the most pressing problems in the world today. Up to 47 candidates from 18 nationalities had applied for the award.
It was a 2002 visit to Malawi by the organization's founder, Scotsman Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, that marked the beginning of the NGO. There MacFarlane-Barrow, who had previously been involved in international aid projects, met Emma, a woman seriously ill with AIDS who had six children. And the forceful response that the oldest of them, Edward (14 years old) gave to the question of what he wanted to do in life served as the seed for what is now Mary's Meals. "I want to have enough to eat and one day go to school."
Before in Malawi, in 1992 MacFarlane-Barrow watched the news about the Bosnian war with his brother in a pub in Argyll (Scotland). So they decided to launch a local campaign to collect food, clothing, medicine and financial donations to send them to the refugee camps. Three weeks later they both left for Bosnia to deliver the aid and the following month Magnus MacFarlane left his job at a fish farm to dedicate himself to humanitarian aid.
The organization, which provides daily food in educational settings to attract chronically poor children into the classroom, began in 2002 to feed 200 children in the African country of Malawi. Two decades later, there are already 2,429,182 beneficiaries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and South America. In addition, it offers support to a home in Romania for young people with HIV who were abandoned as children.
The motto of Mary's Meals is to offer a simple solution to fight hunger in the world and its ambitious goal is for these children to have at least one meal a day and for school enrollment to skyrocket, as the founder himself recounted in an interview in La Against in 2012; an action that close to 67 million primary school children in the world do not do.
MacFarlane-Barrow devised a system that allows a maximum reduction of costs and that achieves that with only 21.63 euros a year a child can be fed every day they attend school. The meals are cooked and distributed at their school by volunteers from the beneficiary community and each child has a container to eat, since it is the way to verify that they belong to a school of the organization and that they attend class daily.
The name of the NGO is in honor of the Virgin Mary, but despite this, Mary's Meals claims that it feeds people "of all religions and none."
The entity collects funds from donations from beneficiaries that in some cases are carried out from its website, from recruitment campaigns or from various initiatives, such as auctions of works donated by artists. The actor Gerard Butler or the singers Annie Lennox and Celine Dion support the cause. MacFarlane-Barrow has been distinguished with the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2011 or an award from the 70th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale), in 2020. He is also Doctor Honoris Causa by the Universities of Stirling, Glasgow Caledonian University and the University of Hull, and in 2015 he was considered one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine.
In Spain Mary's Meals was born in February 2014 and the foundation is chaired by Elisalex Löwenstein. According to the organization's data, 16,722 children directly benefited in 2022 from the help of Mary's Meals in Spain. The organization has groups of volunteers in Barcelona, Cantabria, Molvizar and Otura (Granada), Gran Canaria, Guipúzcoa, Madrid, Marbella (Málaga), Pamplona (Navarra), Seville and Valencia.
