My Clean Plate

Overview

My Clean Plate is a National Campaign to Reduce Food Waste led by a team of students from Ghazi Algosaib School. Their teacher Aisha helped the students to grow the campaign to reach over 70 schools around the Kingdom of Bahrain and to be supported by several public and private institutions that support youth initiatives and innovative solutions in the Kingdom of Bahrain. The campaign focuses on the first three stages of the “Food Waste Management Pyramid”- Prevent, Reduce and Reuse – which aims to improve the behaviour of the individuals consuming food and direct the culture of society towards responsible consumption of food resources.

Theory of Change

The environmental impact of wasted food extends beyond social and humanitarian concerns. My Clean Plate campaign aims to positively impact society by providing practical behavioural substitutes and innovative solutions to the food waste issue. Food consumers should be accountable for their actions as wasting food leads to a loss of natural resources and there is an energy consumption associated with the wasted food. Cutting down on food waste could eliminate 6-8% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

Approach and Actions

Initially, the students collected data and statistics to determine the causes of the food waste problem. They then focused on encouraging individuals within their school to adopt responsible food consumption habits such as teaching them how to manage their meal quantities and how to reuse leftovers. During the first year of the campaign, an official meeting between the students and the Ministry of Education ended up with an official cooperation with the Department of Community Partnership, this enabled Aisha and the students to launch the campaign in 70 schools across the country. A comprehensive action plan was prepared and distributed to the school coordinators.

The students also partnered with the Bahrain Centre for Strategic, International and Energy Studies (Deresat) to carry out a national survey on Individual behaviour in food consumption. This led the students to then take their campaign to the Avenues Bahrain Mall to enable the students to reach a wider audience. In the mall, they used various activities to educate and provide strategies to people on how to fight food wastage. The students built further relationships with institutions which enabled them to source data for their campaigns as well as to collaborate on communication materials and strategies including collaborating with Zain Bahrain (a telecommunications provider) to share a month-long awareness campaign of reel videos about the ‘Food Waste Management Pyramid’. They also hosted 25 workshops across Bahrain that helped spread their message to over 2000 students and approximately 70 teachers. At the end of the academic year, My Clean Plate Voluntary Award was launched to reward the best practices in schools, 12 schools have been awarded the first version of the award.

Impact

One of the biggest successes of the project has been the meaningful relationships that have been developed with public and private institutions across Bahrain. These have led to the campaign becoming a national phenomenon. One of the accomplishments that Aisha and the students are most proud of is that, with the help of the Ministry of Education, My Clean Plate will be included in the curriculum across Bahrain at all stages of elementary and high school, to help spread awareness and to fight the problem of food waste. The campaign has also been adopted by some restaurants. These restaurants have the protocols displayed on their tables, so when customers are about to order or are done with their meals, they can carry out the steps written in the protocol. The campaign is constantly evolving, in the future Aisha and the students hope to incentivise people to follow the campaign protocols by providing ‘Earth points’.