Elijah Amoo Addo is a Ghanaian chef and food stylist who has become a social entrepreneur through his creation of Food for All Africa. Established in 2014, Food for All Africa is a nonprofit social enterprise that operates West Africa’s first community food support centre. Based in the capital of Ghana, Accra, the organisation uses advocacy and a food-sharing mobile phone app to feed thousands of vulnerable children through food recovery and redistribution. Working with local restaurants, supermarkets, food distribution companies, and rural small-hold farmers, Elijah’s organisation collects leftover food or unwanted food that is close to its use-by date and redistributes it to disadvantaged children in orphanages, hospitals and lower-income schools. The organisation is also working on the national policy level to make it easier for suppliers to donate food and claim tax benefits. Additionally, after discovering that as much as 46% of the food produced on farms in Ghana goes to waste because of poor roads, broken-down trucks and inefficient marketing, Food for All Africa is collaborating with a range of stakeholders in the Ghanaian food industry to find ways to reduce food wastage.
In 2017, Elijah was awarded a Queen’s Young Leaders Award by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace for his contribution towards the reforming of Ghana’s food distribution system to reduce waste, overcome hunger, and alleviate poverty and malnutrition. He also received a Takeda Young Entrepreneurship Award from the Takeda Foundation in 2018.
