The Mercy Corps Blog

Blog Post Posted June 10, 2009, 8:14 am by Vanessa Dickey

Dishing out healthy street food

Photo: Mercy Corps Indonesia

This photo was taken at a Mercy Corps-sponsored food cart in north Jakarta, Indonesia. The woman in the photo is the Vice Governor of Jakarta. She was in a neighboring community and heard about the Healthy Street Foods project and got so excited that she stopped by the opening event.

The Healthy Street Foods Project trains and mentors local entrepreneurs to sell healthy food targeted at children under five as a strategy to both reduce malnutrition and address poverty and unemployment. (Caitlin Carlson recently wrote a story on it here.)

The Vice Governor was such a good sport that she donned the vendor outfit and paper crown and started serving food to kids. The child in the photo is dressed up in a traditional Javanese outfit representing the village she comes from in rural Java. The Vice Governor praised the initiative and the leadership in this community. The local leader in this community is up for “Village Leader of the Year” mostly due to projects he is working on with Mercy Corps to reduce malnutrition.

Vendors are selling the food daily and we are monitoring hygiene, nutrition and sales and learning a lot! The vendors are also getting orders to deliver orders to community events and to homes in their community via SMS!

We expected this first month to be slow in terms of sales and profit because of the steep learning curve, but in fact two of the vendors are doing really well. One of them, Ibu Sarifah has already earned enough to pay her child’s school fees.

Education is one of the main reasons that people go into debt in these communities so this is a big success for her. She is very proud and motivated and of course we are encouraged because this is exactly the effect we had hoped for.