We Need to Talk About Toilets
You visit the toilet about six to eight times a day on average 2,500 times a year. This amounts to three years of your life spent sitting on a toilet. If you are lucky. If you are not one of the two and a half billion people in the world unable to access adequate sanitation. […]
Harnessing Markets to Enhance Access to Nutritious Food
Herbert Smorenburg, Senior Manager Netherlands Office, Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition The IFC estimates that the 4.5 billion people at the “base of the pyramid” (BoP) spend $2.3 trillion a year on food and beverages. Even farmers are net purchasers of foods, particularly during the lean season before the next crop is harvested. Yet, this […]
The Nutritional Value of Toilets
“Don’t ever, ever eat in the toilet!” When I grew up I imagined every mother in the world admonished her children with this warning. If you’ve grown up hearing this message, as so many children in middle and high income countries have, you simply cannot think of food and toilets in the same sentence without […]
Innovative Finance Partnerships
Meds and Food for Kids (MFK), a non-profit dedicated to saving children’s lives by fighting malnutrition in Haiti, had a problem. It saw an opportunity to produce high quality therapeutic foods locally and at a scale significant enough to reach thousands of children with this life-restoring product, but to do so it needed financial support […]
Partnerships for Good Growth: Improving Crop Efficiency
Vegetables and Specialty Crops, Syngenta We all know that, globally, our population is growing. To put it into perspective, we are adding over 200,000 people to our planet every day. The good news is that infant mortality is down to the lowest rate in history in many countries, and many people are living longer, fuller […]
Improving Access to Nutritious Food
Cargill The poor eat poorly. In the developing world and developed nations, in rural communities and urban centers, the world’s poor are disproportionately undernourished or unhealthily overweight. The global prevalence of malnutrition is a serious threat to human health and wellbeing. Its consequences are lasting and costly, whether in the form of stunting and other […]
How Do We Achieve Scale in Markets for Nutritious Food?
There is unprecedented interest in building value chains and market-based solutions to make nutritious foods more accessible to the people who need the most, and drive better nutrition. Efforts are spanning conventional sectorial divisions: agricultural development programs are introducing nutrition targets, national-level fortification programs are being scaled up and enterprises are developing specially-formulated supplementary foods […]
Agriculture and Nutrition: Feeding a Growing Population
It’s estimated that by 2050 the world’s population will reach nine billion people; all will need nutritious diets in order to live healthy and productive lives. Yet, despite the intrinsic relationship between the food we eat and the food we grow, the nutrition and agriculture sectors are still not working together closely enough. Indeed, since […]
Partnerships for Nutrition and Agricultural Development
Every night, 842 million women, children and men go to bed hungry. Every day 8,000 children die needlessly from conditions linked to under-nutrition. Globally, 2 billion people suffer from micronutrient malnutrition. These statistics are well known, but they bear repeating. The burden of under-nutrition is incalculable, and the ramifications for children are particularly severe. When […]
Building Healthier Supply Chains
Undernutrition is one of the greatest challenges facing the world today. More than two billion people around the world are deficient in key vitamins and minerals and it is responsible for 11 per cent of the total global disease burden. Because of its direct and indirect impacts, undernutrition is often considered the number one threat […]
Going Beyond Multinationals to Scale up Nutrition
When you think of companies getting involved in the worldwide struggle against undernutrition, which ones come to mind? Probably big. Probably multinational. Probably based in Europe or the United States. But there are companies breaking this mold, showing leadership in the fight against malnutrition. Indofood is a $5 billion-a-year Indonesian food manufacturing and distribution firm […]
Women’s and Children’s Health and the SDGs
By Next year, the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) will be replaced by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) — a set of even more ambitious targets for global development. In a bold attempt to create the healthiest generation of young women and children in the world, the new SDGs will require the near elimination of preventable […]
Ebola Outbreak – Could PPPs Be The Solution?
The Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia is so out of control that governments have resorted to approaches similar to the medieval-era disease control approach last used in 1918: the “cordon sanitaire” whereby no one is allowed out of a barricade established around an infected area. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), […]
Does Fortifying Food Improve Nutrition for the Poorest?
Image: Nsima by Katy Martin Globally, deficiencies in micronutrients are staggering in scale. According to some estimates, between 40 and 60 percent of all children in developing countries suffer negative health consequences from not receiving enough iron, and a similar percentage don’t get enough Vitamin A. One response to this problem has been more widely […]
Easing the Economic Cost of Malaria – With a Vaccine
The interplay between health and economics is unavoidable, particularly when it comes to the impact of malaria on sub-Saharan Africa. Not only does malaria carry a heavy human cost, but it has a heavy economic burden too. Malaria claims around 600,000 lives a year, mostly young children in Africa. This is devastating for families and […]
Can Markets Work For Nutrition? Lessons From Nigeria
Nigeria’s economy has raced to become the largest in Africa. But the country is also ahead on a tragic statistic: it has the highest rates of stunting in Africa, meaning children suffering because they don’t get the nutrients they need to be healthy. Indeed, malnutrition is estimated to kill 350,000 children each year. Today, more […]
Employee Volunteerism Ignites Social Innovation At GSK
Photo: Lisa Kenyon, PULSE Volunteer at AMREF- Kenya By Ahsiya Posner Mencin, Ph.D. Director, PULSE Volunteer Partnership How do you capture the fresh insights and ideas that about 100 high-performing GSK employees develop each year as a result of their PULSE assignments? This is a question that the PULSE Team and I have asked ourselves […]
Selling Sanitary Toilets To The Rural Poor
In our imperfect world, many people live in market systems that are broken – they don’t provide access to the basic things people need to live. iDE is a mechanic of broken markets. We try to look at every component of the market system to see how it can run better to benefit the individual. […]
Improving Healthcare Access in Developing Nations
Outside Kenya’s capital Nairobi lies the small farming town of Embu, which is filled with roadside stalls where farmers sell their mango, potato and rice crops. This remote region, nestled near the hills of Mount Kenya, is the setting for the second phase of the Familia Nawiri (Healthy Family) initiative, one example of a Novartis […]
Going The Extra Mile For Health
In the distant corners of Africa, entrepreneurs deliver goods and services across bumpy roads, crossing brimming rivers and rickety bridges, climbing steep hills and descending treacherous valleys. It is a classic story of conquering odds to reach the unreached. This story once inspired a potent question: If a company can deliver soft drinks to the […]