The founder of Mary's Meals is to be honoured for his work to feed schoolchildren around the world this weekend.
Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow will receive a prize the Ahmadiyya Muslim Peace Prize at the eleventh National Peace Symposium of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in the Baitul Futuh Mosque in Morden, London on Saturday, November 8.
The group founded the prize to recognise important contributions to the advancement of global peace.
MacFarlane-Barrow will receive his prize from the Ahmadiyya Muslim Caliph, His Holiness Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad, who leads the global community that is established in 206 countries and lives by its motto of 'Love for All Hatred for None'.
The Mary's Meals founder set up the charity in 2002. It provides nutritious daily school meals and currently reaches out to over 900,000 children across five continents.
The charity is able to feed a child in school for a year for £12.20.
Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, founder and CEO of Mary's Meals, said: "We began this work more than a decade ago, with a pilot programme providing meals for just 200 children in one primary school in Malawi. The way the work has grown and developed over the last twelve years is truly amazing, and, I believe, a fruit of prayer.
"Now, well over 900,000 children are receiving our meals every day and it is wonderful now to meet young people in college or university or paid employment that tell us they would never have been able to attend school without those meals.
"I have been motivated to do this work by my own Christian, Catholic faith, but this has always been a mission that has involved people of lots of different faiths and none, united in a common desire to see the hungry child fed and educated.
"To have the work of Mary's Meals recognised by a community that promotes peace and inter-faith understanding means a huge amount to me personally.
"With around 57 million children still out of school because of hunger and poverty, I hope this event will bring our vision to more hearts and minds so that we can continue to walk together, unified by our belief that no child in this world of plenty should go hungry or miss school because of poverty."
Rafiq Hayat, National President of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community UK said: "It will be a privilege to welcome Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow at our landmark event. His fantastic work is an inspiration for us all and we are delighted to honour him. In these turbulent times we must do even more to promote, education, justice and peace. This is the message of our Caliph and is the need of the hour."
Other guests at the event include Secretary of State for International Development, Justine Greening; Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Davey; and Catholic Archbishop Kevin McDonald, who will all be speaking at the event.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article