Project Healthy Children (PHC) hopes to end malnutrition in Africa through its small-scale food fortification initiative, named Sanku, that is fundamentally changing nutrition in sub-Saharan Africa. Our game-changing market-based model reaches vulnerable populations by equipping and incentivizing small-scale maize millers to fortify their flour, the most commonly consumed staple food, with life-saving nutrients, without changing their prices.
Two billion people globally suffer from malnutrition, and Africa is hardest hit. Most don’t have access to healthy foods, and every meal is primarily starchy flour. The lack of key vitamins and minerals, especially in a child’s diet, results in millions of people dying every year from preventable sicknesses.
See a Sanku dosifier being installed and used to fortify flour in this video.
The solution? PHC/Sanku adds micronutrients, scientifically proven to improve health and vitality, into the food Africans eat most.
How? We install a “Sanku dosifier” machine, which adds a precise amount of critical nutrients to flour, onto the small African flour mills that produce and sell the staple food families eat every day.
Background
Recognizing that up to 95% of people living in developing countries eat flour from small-scale flourmills—largely due to lack of access to large scale fortification programs addressing micronutrient malnutrition—PHC took the responsibility to literally build a solution. The Sanku Fortification initiative was founded, and got to work on specifically designing a small-scale fortification technology solution to address the major gap in nutrition programming, naming this technology The Sanku Dosifier. The dosifier costs under $3000 per unit, weighs less than a sack of flour, easily attaches to small rural maize mills, and a single machine can fortify the flour for more than 100,000 people daily, making the solution incredibly economic and scalable. PHC/Sanku’s goal is to reach 100 million people by 2025 through this small-scale initiative.
PHC/Sanku offsets the cost of the miller’s nutrients by bulk-buying empty flour bags, which are then sold to the millers to pack their flour. The savings from each flour bag are enough to cover the entire price of the miller’s nutrients, and eventually PHC/Sanku’s operating costs at scale.
PHC/Sanku monitors the miller’s use of the dosifier remotely through a cellular link, and visits the mill if the machine is not in use or needs repair, as well as to restock their nutrients.
The result? It is easy for rural millers to produce quality fortified flour, and families can finally afford to buy and eat healthy food everyday (a 31% increase seen in Tanzania). Children get the key nutrients they need and lives are saved.
By 2021, PHC/Sanku will support 3000 mills, reaching 20 MILLION people, with an eventual operating cost of $0.02 per person per year, sustained through flour bag sales.
How do we scale? Africa has thousands of small mills. PHC/Sanku will reach them cheaply and easily with our staffing model. Each Sanku staff member looks after 100 flour mills, which produce for 500,000 people in total, allowing us to scale to 100 million people by 2025.
We cannot continue to do this critical work without your support. You are among the key supporters helping us to reach our goal of ending malnutrition in Africa.
You can learn more about the project …here
Support PHC here.
