S'porean NGO hopes to feed foreign workers with stuff better than bad rice and expired ingredients

New Year's Resolution: Do something good without having to get up from your chair.

Jeanette Tan| January 07, 03:22 PM

Early last year, Mothership.sg wrote about the meals that some foreign workers are given while on the job in Singapore:

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That's right — what most people wouldn't even serve to a stray dog. Not to say, of course, that stray dogs deserve lousier food than any other dog, or indeed anyone else.

What more for our fellow human beings, who just happen to be the backbone of our economy and infrastructure, eh?

Enter a Singapore NGO 

Thankfully, not all of us are sitting back and criticising the inhumanity of profiteering caterers and middle-men.

A Singaporean social enterprise, Base of Pyramid (BoP) Hub, is raising money for a project called 45Rice. Started by World Toilet Organisation (WTO) founder Jack Sim, the project will hopefully bring more nutritious food to these folks.

The plan?

According to Today 45Rice ('fortified' rice, get it?) is working with a Dutch food supplement company to deliver fresh, more nutritious meals to workers. The Dutch company will import rice grains that are enhanced with nutrients, blended with regular rice and sold to caterers.

From there, they will collect the cooked meals and bring them to a targeted 350,000 workers, starting with those in the construction industry.

The plan is, from the funds raised, to set up a facility here to produce, sell and distribute the enhanced rice to caterers and foreign workers.

BOP Hub is also running a test programme with a firm called Union Construction, where BOP orders, pays and supplies food from caterers to workers — they're aiming to replace middlemen who earn up to $30 per worker per month, from each worker.

Sounds like a cause worth supporting to you?

Here's what you can do, apart from cooking food of your own and bringing it to your nearest construction site to hand out: donate to their project here.

Screenshot from Giving.sg page Screenshot from Giving.sg page

It won't even require you to get out of your chair.

They're building our homes, buildings, roads, expressways, MRT stations and pretty much everything else we see around us. Surely it makes sense for us to be feeding them properly, yeah?

 

Top image from file.

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