Amis BK Cape Town: COVID19 Food distribution Campaign

www.amisbk.org

Amis BK Support Group, also known as “AMIS BK”, is an organisation of social inclination and development aimed at giving support to the destitute families. It is a community based organisation (with registration number 085-501-NPO) which was founded in 2007 in Cape Town as an empowerment platform that seeks to lead social positive change through advocacy, information dissemination and service. Our programmes seek to promote social cohesion and integration of refugees and asylum seekers into the local communities through education, sports, cultural activities as well as self-reliance projects. Thus, participants and beneficiaries of our programmes are both refugees/asylum seekers and South African locals.

Amis BK screened a total of 163 vulnerable families in the community that are totally vulnerable as a result of the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of members in those families varies between three (3) and ten (10) people. Most of them are refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. They work in the informal sector as hairdressers, barmen, waiters, babysitters, cleaners and others are unemployed. With this kind of jobs, savings are impossible and one puts food on the table only if they have gone out to work. None of them have benefited from neither the Unemployment Insurance Fund nor the food parcels from the Department of Social Development

Recently, Amis BK embarked in a food distribution campaign that managed to feed 46 families. Due to limited funds, we are not able to reach out to all the families we have identified. We therefore wish to extend the distribution of food parcels to the other 117 families.