Describe the critical need your solution addresses.

A key goal established by the UN seeks to reduce by half the mortality rate of children under 5 years. While severe malnutrition is a serious problem around the world, it is particularly serious in India, where over 57 million children are underweight and 20% of these are severely malnourished.

Explain your initiative in more depth and its stage of development.

CTI has had a project using ready to use therapeutic food (RUTF) in Haiti since 2002, where Meds and Food for Kids uses CTI grinders to produce nearly 15,000 Kg/month to treat 24,000 severely malnourished children/year. CTI is developing a similar, expanded project in India. RUTF formulas based on UNICEF guidelines have been developed and are ready for pilot production. CTI will develop nutritionally equivalent formulations using local ingredients, which will be enriched with appropriate vitamins and micro-nutrients.

This project will be undertaken in collaboration with Yusuf Meherally Centre (YMC) at a site near Mumbai. The initial steps will include developing pilot facilities, identifying supply chain details and establishing production goals. Center for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas at IIT-Bombay will be a local technology resource. The product will be clinically tested versus a control product at a YMC primary clinic under physician supervision.

After approval, CTI will continue to work with YMC to insure that the project is sustainable without outside financial support. CTI and YMC will then replicate the process at other YMC facilities in Maharashtra and Gujarat as well as rest of India. CTI and YMC will develop training programs to facilitate dissemination of this technology.

How does your strategy and approach respond creatively and comprehensively to key issues?

According to a 2005 report by the World Bank, “The prevalence of child undernutrition in India is among the highest in the world, nearly double that of Sub-Saharan Africa, with dire consequences for morbidity, mortality, productivity and economic growth. We find that although levels of undernutrition in India declined modestly during the 1990s, the reductions lagged far behind that achieved by other countries with similar economic growth rates. Nutritional inequalities…in general, are increasing.”

Through this project, CTI seeks to change the situation in India and dramatically improve the health of children under the age of 5. In addition to treating SAM children with a RUTF product, an integrated approach to providing supplemental nourishment to children under 5 is also needed. Towards that end we will also develop Supplementary Foods and High Energy Nutritious Snacks which will be used to follow the RUTF regimen to insure that the children will continue to thrive after their recovery from SAM. Finally, the products will be produced by local resources with locally available ingredients and disseminated in a scale-out process to YMC clinics/centers around India.

This project:

• addresses a clearly defined and acute problem;
• uses a structured approach with the goal to develop locally self-sustaining, small-scale manufacturing ventures to improve nutrition, create jobs, and offer work skills at the local, village level; and
• aims to create training expertise and documentation that can be used to train and launch similar ventures internationally (essentially a “procedure manual” for small-scale, rural manufacturing and distribution of the nutrition product that can be used with local ingredients and jobs in any other region).