In a little brick cottage, a teenage girl tells me very quietly that she is HIV positive but that she keeps it a secret from her friends.

Another girl sits under a mango tree and talks about the days she goes hungry - sometimes she and her family have to eat leaves from the trees to survive. And not far away from them both, on a large green chair resembling the throne of a potentate, a representative of the government of Malawi who has been paid a daily "fee" to turn up here today says he will end corruption and that his government will make things better.

It's hard to see how. In the last few weeks, the World Bank has named the beautiful but desperately fragile country of Malawi as the poorest in the world and against the forces of poverty, HIV/Aids and corruption, the chances of significant improvement and development in the near future do not look good. To make matters worse, aid to Malawi from governments around the world, including the UK's, was recently pulled after it was discovered millions of it was being siphoned off to be misused. That aid provided almost half of Malawi's entire budget. And now it's gone.

But there is at least some help being provided by the man standing at the back of the crowd. Twelve years ago, inspired by a visit to the country, Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow started a charity called Mary's Meals that tried to tackle the fact that millions of the country's children go hungry every day. It started with around 200 children in a few villages around the city of Blantyre but last week a ceremony was held in the Machinga district in the south of the country to mark the fact the charity has now fed one million children with a maize and soya porridge.

 

 

Is the Mary's Meals model the answer in Malawi? Even MacFarlane-Barrow admits it can't be on its own, but he wants me to see how the whole process works so he's taken me to a school at Ntungulutsi about two hours drive from Blantyre. We're going to see the whole daily Mary's Meal organisation from beginning to end and then, at the end of it, try to see where Malawi can go from here.

We arrive at the school in Ntungulutsi about 7am. It's an early start but already the quadrangle, surrounded by low brick buildings, is full of children. Most of them are wearing the school's neat blue uniform but not all of them are. A little sign of the support and help that comes from Scotland is the top that's being worn by one little boy: Celtic FC. Nearby, another boy is showing his loyalty to Motherwell.

A couple of hundred yards from the school is a small house almost hidden by climbing vines and plants (Malawi is at the end of its rainy season so everything is lush and abundant). This is the home of the headmaster, who lives here with his wife, six children and the two children of her sister, who died of HIV in 2007 when she was 31.

This is the story you hear in Malawi over and over again, on a grim loop: how HIV/Aids has cut through the population and is still doing so. At a nursery for under-sixes, one of the Mary's Meals staff takes me aside and asks me in a quiet voice if I realise why Aids has spread in Malawi. It is "cultural" she says and when I ask if she means religious and the attitude of the Catholic Church to safe sex, she nods. It's a sensitive subject here, in this God-fearing country.

The consequences of the Aids crisis have been dramatically played out in the headmaster's house where I meet his 16-year-old niece Tiogne - which means Give Thanks (her brother's name is Wonderful). Tiogne lost her mother to Aids when she was eight years old and was born HIV positive. She is healthy right now because of the anti-viral drugs provided for free by the government, but drugs don't treat stigma.

"I get along very well with my friends," says Tiogne, "but it's because they don't know my HIV status. I think if I disclosed the truth, they would not be very friendly. I had a friend who was ill and then people started staying away from her."

What doesn't help Tiogne's condition is the fact that, even though her uncle is headmaster, they still struggle to pay for food. Some days, says Tiogne, she is weak with hunger, but what helps is that she is guaranteed at least some food every day thanks to Mary's Meals.

"Mary's Meals porridge is very helpful," she says. "When I eat the porridge, I have the energy to learn well in class." She would like to work in a bank one day, she says, so that she can pay the school fees for her brothers and sisters. Primary education is free here but secondary school costs £50 per year per child and Tiogne's aunt Esther says the worst times are when the fees are due - that's when they are most likely to go without food.

It's now 8am and time for school so Tiogne gathers up her jotters and walks across to her first class. We go into one classroom and there are at least 150 pupils crammed in there, learning maths. They break out into a welcome song in the traditional Malawian style of question and answer ("Should we welcome our guests?" "Yes, we should welcome our guests!").

MacFarlane-Barrow asks them what they are learning today and they all shout an answer in unison. TRIANGLES!

Do you enjoy the porridge, he asks. YES!

Does it help you learn? YES!

And the evidence of that is in the enrolment figures here: attendance usually goes up by about a quarter at schools where Mary's Meals provides its porridge and it's the same at this school.

We wander over to the kitchens where the porridge is being prepared in seven huge pots suspended over wood burners. The women who work here are all volunteers gathered from the 37 villages that surround the school and from 6am until noon they prepare and serve the food and clean up afterwards. The porridge is made from maize and soya and is fortified with vitamins. It has a woody, semolina-like taste; many of the children like to add sugar before they eat it.

It's nearly 9am now and, clutching their multicoloured cups, the children are starting to gather for their food. The older ones form queues but the younger ones take a bit of corralling and behind them is MacFarlane-Barrow, a 6ft 2in Scotsman who's double their size. Most of the time, despite his visibility, the head of Mary's Meals likes to hang about at the back of the crowds, a little shy, a little awkward. He admits to me that he's essentially an introvert doing the job of an extrovert and so he forces himself to do it. But you can see the strain sometimes.

You can also see a little prickliness when some of the awkward questions about aid and religion come up. Standing beside the kitchen, with great plumes of smoke from the stoves rising up above him, I ask him if the Mary's Meals model is problematic in some ways. Enrolment goes up, which is great news, but if there aren't enough schools, or teachers, or books, increasing the number of pupils could increase the strain on already scarce resources.

"I don't agree with that," he says. "My starting point is if children are hungry, we should feed them. There has been a dramatic rise in enrolment since we started Mary's Meals at this school but all those children would be out there working in the fields or sitting at home hungry right now.

"If the criticism is that we're adding to the problem of resources in school by bringing more children in, I think all children have the right to education so bring them in and make them visible and let's solve those other problems."

As for religion, MacFarlane-Barrow is Catholic and named his charity after the mother of Jesus, but in his work he downplays his faith. "I'm not ashamed to talk about my personal Christian faith if people want to talk about it but people don't have to have a Christian faith, or any other faith, to be involved in the mission of Mary's Meals. It's a universal mission."

As we walk around the school, we can see the mission's positive effects in the packed, happy classrooms and the next day we see it even more clearly in the one millionth child that Mary's Meals has fed: Patuma Macheso. Three weeks ago, Patuma, who is 13, was sometimes forced to live on boiled leaves but is now tucking into porridge every day.

But it's also clear how far MacFarlane-Barrow's mission has to go. At Ntungulutsi, many of the children have the distended tummies that tell of malnutrition; many others, including Patuma, are much shorter than they should be for their age, another sign that they are not getting the nutrition they need.

Mary's Meals is helping to tackle that to a large extent (the charity is now feeding around 27 per cent of the children in Malawi) but action is also needed on two other fronts: foreign government aid and positive action by the Malawian government, and on both, the signs are not good. When official governmental corruption was exposed in 2013, governments around the world, including the UK's, cut aid to Malawi and MacFarlane-Barrow both comprehends and is frustrated by that.

"I understand why it stopped," he says. "You can't keep giving money to governments if there's no accountability in how it's spent. But I think there are other ways that funding can be channelled and I hope the UK Government is considering that."

The relationship with the Malawian government is trickier. Corruption and open money-making is common, but Mary's Meals needs to work with government and has agreed to pay some of the minister's so-called expenses for his attendance at the millionth-child ceremony after refusing his department's initial, more outrageous demands. At the event itself, some of the Mary's Meals staff also tell me how outraged they are when the minister, Vincent Ghambi, publicly takes credit for progress in schools, such as increased enrolment, that has little to do with any government action.

When I speak to him afterwards, the minister is bullish in his defence of his government. He says the country is struggling because of the massive cuts in investment by international donors, but does he understand that they were forced to act because of corruption?

"Yes, I do," says Ghambi. "We had a problem where some civil servants had access to government coffers but this government has changed all the systems - we have put measures in place to ensure that money doesn't just come out anyhow. But the government is struggling and we need those donors back."

MacFarlane-Barrow agrees with that, but he also acknowledges that aid, and then more aid, is not the long-term solution. As far as he is concerned, the answer is education and Mary's Meals is helping to improve that in Malawi by attracting children to school. He believes the meals they provide is aid but also a means of escaping aid.

"It is immediate aid we provide," he says, "that does that most basic thing, but at the same time, this generation growing up in education has a chance of escaping dependence on aid. Malawi will never escape its dependence on aid unless it has an educated generation so what we're doing is the very first building block in making that happen." He looks round the quadrangle filled with hundreds of children. "Please God, one day the government in Malawi and the local community will be able to feed their children here without us."

To donate visit marysmeals.org.uk