Product/Service Development

Iron is vital to early childhood health, growth and development, and for lifelong wellness, lowering the risk of diarrhea, measles, malaria and pneumonia. Yet a lack of iron is the world's most widespread micronutrient deficiency. This project will fortify a common staple - dal (dehulled lentil, pea, chickpea) - to triple iron intake in the diets of high-risk populations.

Burkina Faso remains one of the poorest countries in the world, where malnutrition affects children under five years in particular and causes 40,000 deaths per year. Social enterprise FasoPro wants to fight hunger and malnutrition by developing a diverse range of products using caterpillars' shea, a highly nutritious larva that is a widespread local resource in Burkina Faso. The approach will involve local agriculture businesses for sustainability and also improve awareness and local know-how about malnutrition.

An integrated model for eliminating childhood malnutrition in rural Uganda will be implemented by in Luuka District, Eastern Uganda. A food product made from locally available food will daily enrich the children's diet. Successful project results will be translated into the Uganda food and nutrition policy.

If a child is malnourished during the first 2 years of life, the child's physical and mental development will be slowed to such an extent that no correction is possible even when the child eventually grows older. This project explores the possibility of empowering local grocers to select and provide 3 meals per day to children less than 2 years and also to all lactating mothers in their own communities.

Is there a chance kids could snack their way to good health? This project is developing snacks fortified with iron-rich rice bran, an abundant by-product of rice processing typically discarded, burned, fed to animals or turned into cooking oil. The project will engage local expertise in food and chemistry, and capitalize on the "culture of snacking" in the Philippines, a country where iron deficiency affects 70% of children, leading to anemia and other debilitating conditions.

Our project will help solve the problem of malnutrition among vulnerable people through nutrition and hygiene skills development. It will use positive deviance hearth approach and growth monitoring which will stand as evidence based to scale up to large number of beneficiaries. It will be implemented in Caritas, Rwanda, targeting poor and vulnerable people in the rural area.

By developing a local nutritional supplement, along with a rewards system to incentivize companies to pay for and sustain its production and free distribution, this project will improve nutritional status among children ages six months to five years in slums.

Poor sanitation poses a major health threat. Human excreta released into the environment without treatment causes illness and death. Every 15 seconds, a child dies due to contaminated water from human feces, with the situation being the worst in urban slums. Peepoople is rethinking sanitation with the design of a personal, self-sanitising and fully biodegradable toilet that prevents feces from contaminating the immediate area, as well as the surrounding ecosystem. After use, Peepoo turns human waste into valuable fertiliser that can improve livelihoods and increase food security.

The primary focus of this study in Pakistan will be improving the food production under reduced water conditions to feed the ever increasing population of the world.

The ""Sustainable Aquatic Agriculture for Lakes"project, of Grupo Cabal in Nicaragua and the University of Costa Rica in Costa Rica, will test technologies to cultivate aquatic plants and horticultural and grain crops on floatation, contributing to increase food production without spending fresh water beyond what normally evaporates from lakes.