Eating Rabbit for protein project kick-starts in schools

Although rabbit meat has high protein value than more eaten meats in Ghana, it’s still not known to many Ghanaians due to the lack of promoting the benefit of eating rabbit meat. Base on this, two rabbits farmers started a campaign called Eating Rabbit For Protein In School to create the awareness of health benefits and nutritional importance of rabbit meat and make rabbit meat easy and accessible to all meat eaters present and focusing on the next and upcoming generations as well.

After a series of visibility studies across most of our schools in the country, we realized that, because of the busy schedules of students each and every day, students hardly pay attention to the nutritional quality of their everyday meals.

Due to this reason, they just eat everything that keeps them going regardless of the health and nutritional importance of the ration.

And once they get glued to this attitude, they grow with it seeing it normal. But then, what we take into our bodies plays a very important role in our lifetime as humans.

Secondly, some students who are also mindful of this need to eat a lot of meat which has high protein level allowed per day. This gives us the platform to embark on this very project.

As we said earlier, we have to target the next generations to help change this attitude among the consumers. So we mapped out a strategy to make rabbit meat easy, accessible and ready for consumption to the JHS and the SHS level. We started with schools in greater Accra, and after series of educating the students about the nutritional values and health benefits of rabbit meat, we picked Ideal College in Madina as our first school to initiate the project.

The first phase of the project was to introduce the meat to the students after all the education and awareness they had earlier. To make the meat easy, enjoyable and ready for consumption, we neatly processed rabbit meat into kebab, that we grill and serve hot at a stand on the campus.

After some few weeks, the students realized how healthy and important it is to have rabbit meat on daily basis. As we were selling rabbit meat to the students in a kebab form, we continued to educate them and also opened our ears to their comments and anticipations. Most of these students, wanted something more than just the meat in a kebab form, most of them also wanted it in a kebab form with drinks. Yes we wanted to progress from the kebab level to another level after some months but because they wanted more than the kebab, we immediately sat down and came up with the next phase, and that is adding a staple food with the meat. We are coming up with T.Z and rabbit meat. For the students to understand that rabbit meat can be eaten with any meal.

Rabbit meat is very good for the following reasons, it's one of the best white meats available on the market today, it has a high percentage of easily digestible protein and contains the least amount of fat among all the other available meets. Rabbit meat contains less calorie and cholesterol free which is good for heart patient. Rabbits meat is good for anti-aging and weight loss

This project is empowered by Ekow’ Farm and Amitie Farm with Larry Ekow Hagan as the Project Manager, Lemaine Hagan Project Head of Project from Canada and Emmauel Kofi Blankson as Production Manager.