Over the next three years, in partnership with GAIN, we are planning a rapid expansion of the business, which by year 3 we estimate will be reaching 60,000 people within Nairobi with high quality milk, with opportunities to expand within Kenya and potentially later across the East Africa region.
I would say that one key lesson is that scale is necessary in order to maintain affordability to the target population.
On where are the innovations happenings to support greater supply of and demand for nutritious foods, and what are we learning about what works?
There are a number of incubators / accelerator programs out there today that support interventions within agriculture. There is often an assumption that this will lead, in time, to more diverse diets and increased consumption of nutritious foods, but direct efforts to ensure that nutritious and diverse food items are both accessible and affordable for low income consumers are rare.
Through the Marketplace for Nutritious Foods, GAIN is supporting 22 companies in Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique to do just this. In Kenya this process is supporting a company that makes chicken, as a key source of protein available to low income consumers and which expects to reach 30,000 people a year by year 3 of the project; while in Mozambique we are working with a company to locally produce and sell peanut butter at a price and in a package size accessible for most Mozambican consumers.
In Bangladesh GAIN has been working to seek opportunities for improving the nutrient density of rice. This process has led to innovations in fortifying rice grain in zinc during the soaking process, thus creating opportunities for addressing zinc deficiency which is a major problem and can lead to stunting.
Helen - Thanks for the reference to the Hystra/GAIN research. It is good to see detailed research in to behaviour change at the BoP, and the factors you need in place alongside evidence of the benefits to raise awareness and demand. I'll delve deeper in to this now. It is a huge challenge to get widespread awareness. There are some interesting activities of companies in this space. It would be good to share examples.
One area where the evidence is clearest is public distribution. Public agencies do plug many of the market gaps by procuring products, certifying their quality and distributing them to the people most in need. The problem is the public resources are vastly outpaced by the scale of chronic undernutrition.
There's room to explore models that develop parallel products for both public systems and for consumer markets. Also, agencies can run programmes in a way that allows suppliers to deliver innovation and efficiency. We've written a short briefing about this:
Up-front investment in research and development is a key barrier to scaling up solutions to under nutrition. This is where the public funding, academia and private sector can really work well together to produce more nutritious crop varieties- CGIAR’s Harvest Plus programme, CGIAR’s agriculture for nutrition and health programme, GAIN’s work on a business platform.
We also note that many companies are struggling to attract the investment required to support their business innovations. When it comes to investment capital, there is no one size that fits all. Companies require different types of financing at different stages of their growth, so GAIN has structured partnerships with different types of investors who complement each other. This has ensured that various forms of financing, from small to large amounts, can be made available to firms that operate in different parts of the agriculture-nutrition value chain and have a range of funding needs.
Through the implementation of our projects GAIN has certainly learned that while many entrepreneurs have great ideas, they often need technical assistance and mentoring to develop these ideas further and to equip them with the skills to run successful businesses.
We have also found that providing a platform for entrepreneurs and other stakeholders within the agribusiness and nutrition fields to come together helps companies to tackle issues and challenges inhibiting improvements in the quality and delivery of nutritious foods, as well as explore solutions; share lessons learned; and exchange knowledge on market opportunities and policy improvements
We are learning that there are significant number of companies out there with business concepts in mind, that would bring down the unit cost of nutritious food in question and/or repackaging and distributing the food products in such a way that price is affordable to low income consumers and although the nutrition impact of this approach is yet to be evaluated with the companies that GAIN has supported to date, initial indicators seem to be that this process will lead to increased consumption of a range of nutritious foods.
Having said all the above however, by applying innovative tools and methods to identify nutrient gaps in specific age-cohorts of children, we see that agriculture alone will not always provide all the micronutrients required for a healthy body. In certain situations, efforts to address nutrition through agriculture need to be complemented through other interventions such as home fortification using micronutrient powders or the fortification of major staple foods to ensure the right balance of nutrients that Aimee talked about. Thank you all
Thanks Enock. I've been following the GAIN Marketplace with interest. Do you think the main potential is with formal companies and SMEs? What about the hundreds of thousands of informal businesses? They are already supplying food to large numbers of the people affected by undernutrition. What potential is there to work with them? And will this require very different approaches? We've learned from some relatively successful examples, like with cereal-legume infant foods in Ghana, an innovation with spread rapidly in the informal sector.
http://www.globalisationanddevelopment.com/2013/01/is-small-best-size-for-nutrition.html
I agree with Enock on that we need to find solutions that work across to agriculture. I recently visited a farm just outside Maputo where they were growing a new seed of vitamin A enriched sweet potato. The farmers were benefitting as it had higher yields than the none enriched potato; it was selling; they were producing so much of it that they were innovating into sweet potato juice, biscuits, cakes, soufflé! Good for nutrition and good for the farmers, who were consuming and selling.
That brings us to the end of this live session! Thanks to everyone who joined us. We'll leave the discussion open, so please do feel free to post your comments.
To find out more about the topic, check out this week's Scaling Nutrition Special with GAIN, IDS and DFID:
I agree. Very likely to multiple overlapping approaches. Coordinating these will be key. We've tried to synthesize across the various approaches being tried in Tanzania and Nigeria, which might provide some good lessons.
Thank you for the opportunity to join the discussion. Very interesting indeed. Have a good day all.
Thanks everyone for a really interesting discussion. Look forward to continuing to learn from all the efforts and models shared today.
Thank you for the invitation and great insights.
Dear Ewan, I am happy to note that you have been following the GAIN Marketplace, please continue and you can find even more information on our newly-launched website by follwoing the links below:
http://www.gainhealth.org/; http://www.gainhealth.org/programs/agriculture-nutrition/; http://www.gainhealth.org/knowledge-centre/project/marketplace-for-nutritious-foods/
Coming back to your question, the informal sector in most developing economies, especially in Sub Saharan Africa, are engines driving most initiatives and businesses, including the food business. This sector is wide and diverse. They have a lot of knowledge that we can tap into and for sure, they know how to this sector works.The challenge to all of us is to come up with innovative approaches that would bring them on-board, approaches that address the barriers that have kept them informal. if we do that, the sky will be the limit.
Thanks Enock. I look forward to getting more into the GAIN Marketplace and hearing about the emerging results.
On the informal sector, IDS has been doing some work here, in food but also in other sectors. We're learning important things about what does and doesn't work. Check out our recent policy briefing on the fortification programme in Tanzania, which has been trying to bring small maize millers and oil presses on board. We're interested to learn more from what's happening on the ground and contribute where we can!
http://www.ids.ac.uk/publication/ensuring-that-food-fortification-will-reach-the-poor-in-tanzania