Charity | Serena Hotel Uganda Gives Back – Mwana Mugimu Malnutrition Unit Gets a Boost – Mulago Hospital.

Uganda Demographic Health Survey 2011 estimated that 2.4 million children (about 33 per cent) aged below five years, are stunted and about 110,220 children have died in the last five years due to malnutrition. This was again reported in The Monitor Newspaper early 2012, that malnutrition was killing more children than malaria and HIV Aids.

This information was overwhelming for us at Kampala Serena Hotel. We had been carrying out CSR but it was adhoc.  Since we are a hospitality Industry and have knowledge on nutrition, we agreed that this was an area where we could touch young lives and bring a smile to both the parents and their children.

We decided to pay Mwana Mugimu a visit and we met Dr. Elizabeth Kiboneka – the Unit Head. She took us through the Units responsibilities and challenges. Apart from treating the malnourished children back to health, the parents and caretakers are taught and  participate in the preparation of their children’s food to give them hands-on proper food preparation methods. They are also taught how to balance the children’s meals, the types of food to give, in what quantities and at what intervals.

Doctor Kiboneka explained that most of the parents are young single mother from age 18-24. They themselves are also malnourished and are unable to breast feed their babies. “Proper nutrition starts before conception, continues during pregnancy, after birth, throughout the breast feeding and after weaning the baby.”

We agreed that Serena Hotels – Uganda would on a monthly basis supplement Mwana Mugimu with therapeutic food. 100 kgs of Soy flour, Rice flour, Rice grain and Sugar. We also give 100 kgs of dry beans and maize flour for the parents and care takers who might not have enough to eat to be able to breast feed their children. We have done this since 2012 to date.

Mwana Mugimu has become part of the Serena family. Whereas we do have other corporate social responsibilities we carry out Mwana Mugimu and St. Mary Kevin Orphanage are our core CSR projects. We celebrate Christmas with them and for the 1^st time 14^th February 2016, we celebrated Valentine’s Day with Mwana Mugimu.

To commemorate this, we carried out some repairs to their Kitchen and dining room and painted them. We also shared lunch with the children, the parents, caretakers and staff.

We believe together with the Doctor’s we helped ward off the trauma caused by their sickness and gave hope to these children whom we believe will be great citizens of Uganda.

After from the above In partnership with World Wildlife Fund-Uganda, Kampala Serena and Lake Victoria Serena Golf Resort & Spa has  an 8 acre earmarked plot of land in the 1,700 acre Navugulu Forest Reserve – a gazetted reserve of degraded and heavily encroached woodland – where it carries out re-afforestation efforts in collaboration with the National Forestry Authority.

WWF-U is running a re-afforestation project as part of a broader livelihoods program aimed at ensuring the preservation of the forest by surrounding communities (1,000 individuals), including energy-efficient stoves, solar lamps, and beekeeping.

Source — Kampala Serena Hotel PR office.