Malnutrition doesn’t care about passports, borders, colours.
It’s a killer.
My name is Felix Brooks-church
and every day I fight malnutrition
by guaranteeing that every meal
consumed by every mother and child
contains lifesaving nutrients.
When you have a population
that’s dependent on a very starchy staple food,
like maize flour here in East Africa,
they are being deprived of all the other nutrients.
It’s actually coined “hidden hunger”.
Malnutrition affects roughly two billion people globally.
The result of that is approximately 14,000 children
under the age of five dying every single day.
Our mission is to stop that.
We’ve identified where this food’s being produced.
It’s not at the large scale. It’s at these small, village-level mills.
For example, here in Tanzania,
they feed upwards of 90% of the population,
so if you’re able to get nutrients at that source,
you’re going to reach a lot of people.
Food fortification has been done
for decades in high-income nations.
It’s standard because it works, it saves lives across the world.
What we do is add a machine that we invented.
We call it the dosifier.
It attaches to that mill and is a one-size-fits-all.
As that miller adds a bucket of raw grain,
there’s another compartment
that holds this concentrated pre-mix,
which is a powdered form of nutrients.
In our case, we’re adding B12, zinc, iron,
all these building blocks that we need
in our normal diet that they don’t have.
Yeah, it’s okay. It’s still accurate…
Automatically, a feed-screw doses a little bit of this powder
into the grain, and then the mill grinds it into a fortified flour.
Then that’s packed away.
That’s sold to mothers at small shops.
They go home, they cook it, they feed their children.
To neutralize that cost,
we bulk-purchased all these empty flour bags
for all our millers,
so now we’re selling these empty pink flour bags,
at the same price he was buying before,
stamped with the government-approved seal,
but we see about a 25% margin, enough to cover the nutrients.
Meaning he can now create a fortified
product that doesn’t cost any more.
We’re empowering these millers now
to be producers of healthy, lifesaving, nutritious food.
As long as we have the opportunity
to combat malnutrition and make people healthy
we’re going to be doing this work.
I think this is a big fight, I think this is a long fight
and we’re definitely committed till the end.