The Hand That Gives

Mastura Rashid from The Nasi Lemak Project talks about how this national dish is enriching the lives of so many. 

- Mastura Rashid

Ask what dish unites all Malaysians across the board and you’re very likely to hear that it’s nasi lemak. Mastura Rashid has found a way to make it even more special: turning it not only into a plate that will feed growling stomachs come lunch or dinner, but a source of opportunities for struggling families.

A STROKE OF INSPIRATION

No stranger to helping out the unfortunate, she’s been involved in poverty elevation work since 2012. Over time, she realised that giving free classes to children and building libraries in low-cost housing (PPR) areas did very little to address the problem head-on. What she did notice, though, was how delicious the packets of nasi lemak the mothers of the children she schooled whipped up. “When I asked why they didn’t sell them, the answers were always the same: there was no market or capital to do so,” she tells me. Couple this with the fact that she and her co-founder, Zul Imran Ishak, discovered that more than 70 per cent of families living in PPRs, many of them with plenty of children, were earning less than RM1,500. And so, they decided that helping the families raise their standard of living by selling nasi lemak was an idea worth exploring, especially since “Malaysians love to eat!”

THE INS AND OUTS