After three years of hard work, Project Healthy Children (PHC) reached a major milestone in our efforts to reach the one billion people who are severely malnourished and have no access to conventional forms of food fortification.
In the small community of Chapagaon, outside of Kathmandu, PHC successfully installed a fully-functioning version of its small scale dosifier, fortifying food for the people of this small Nepali village. Over the next week, PHC – with its partners (Imagine Lalitpur, Stanford University, and The Micronutrient Initiative) – will be rolling out four more villages throughout rural Nepal, completing what we hope is our final testing of the device.
For fifty years, the issue of how to fortify food in very small mills – mills that reach about one billion people – has stumped the nutritional community. Thus far, these populations have either gone neglected, or in a few cases reached by very expensive supplementation programs. This population is also the most vulnerable to disease and other health and educational issues. The device installed by PHC has a cost of about one tenth the next best alternative, is light enough to be carried and installed by a single person, and should work in mills throughout all of Asia and Africa. The estimated price of the entire device is less than $100 USD, and the annual cost to fortify the food is only pennies per person each year.
Vitamin and mineral deficiency is the leading cause of preventable blindness, death during childbirth, and mental retardation. It is responsible for the loss of about fifteen IQ points in a child, and can increase the survival rate of diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, measles, and HIV/AIDS between one third and one half. The Copenhagen Consensus determined that micronutrient intervention was the most cost effective means of improving the lives of people in the developing world.
Our hope is that by the end of this year, PHC will have a device that will be available for anyone interested in implementing small scale fortification, which we believe will significantly impact the lives of the one billion people thus far neglected.
PHC is grateful for our partnerships with The Micronutrient Initiative, Stanford University, and the Nepali organization, Imagine Lalitpur.