Kenyan farmer Krista Omori struggled to feed her five children. She worked the same small plot of land, growing maize as her family had for generations. “She never had any good harvests”, says Fred Maisiba of the One Acre Fund. “The couple of bags she managed to harvest only lasted a short time and after that the family went hungry.”
The One Acre Fund approached Krista and offered help, in the form of a small loan and the opportunity to buy better seed and fertiliser, training in more effective ploughing techniques and advice on when to plant and when to sell. Krista’s harvest from her 1.2 acres grew to nine bags.
“She was very happy,” Maisiba says. “She could even store three bags in excess to sell later.”
More than 50 million families in sub-Saharan Africa earn a living from small farms. They produce 80% of the continent’s food, but their harvests are poor compared to the rest of the world.
One Acre Fund provides Kenyan farmers the means to increase crop and harvest quality
Maisiba, a strategy specialist in Kakamega in western Kenya, and one of more than 8,000 locals employed by the charity, says One Acre’s results are measurable in profits for farmers. A donation of US$50 ($70) to the fund provides a farm family of six with the tools to boost harvests and profits by double the donation amount. He says better harvests improve the quality of a family’s life in many less obvious ways too. In Krista’s case, the profit she made paid her children’s school fees.
The One Acre Fund is one of a growing number of charities focused on developing and implementing evidence-based, cost-effective programs that reduce the burden of poverty for hundreds of millions of people. These are the types of charities that people should support, according to a growing movement that promotes effective giving. In his book The Life You Can Save, philosopher Peter Singer champions the effective giving movement, and his meta-charity The Life You Can Save curates a list of effective organisations that have come up with solutions that have the most impact per dollar.
One such organisation is Sanku – Project Healthy Children, which has zeroed in on the problem of poor nutrition in developing countries. It works with village mills, adding essential vitamins to the locally milled flour with a high-tech, centrally monitored machine called a dosifier.
Co-founder and CEO Felix Brooks-church says the project was conceived in the face of the problem of “hidden hunger”, which affects more than 2 billion people worldwide. “They aren’t suffering from starvation due to a lack of food,” he says. “Their bellies might be full but they’re starving from lack of nutrients, and without these nutrients their weaker immune systems make them more susceptible to diarrhoea and diseases like malaria – things you shouldn’t die from. A small child’s immune system can be very fragile.”
Hidden hunger has a devastating effect on children. “Eight thousand children every single day under the age of five pass away,” Brooks-church says. “And there’s a relatively simple solution: these children need more vitamins and minerals in their diet.”
The dilemma for the charity was how to make that happen. “You could go door to door and try to get people to take multivitamins every day but obviously that’s not very scalable,” Brooks-church says. It was the realisation that the staple diet in East Africa is corn or maize porridge that led to a solution.
“For us, the big ‘aha’ moment was, let’s get the nutrients into that flour source at these small mills and then they are going to be feeding a couple of thousand people around the village. That would mean we can scale up a lot faster, reach more people and have more control over the process.”
Sanku- Project Healthy Children works with local grain mills in East Africa to introduce essential nutrients into a village’s staple diet. Image courtesy of ProjectHealthyChildren.org
Project Healthy Children equips millers with a dosifier that fortifies grain with the correct amount, as determined by the World Health Organisation, of iron, folic acid, B12, and zinc. The machines are connected centrally. “We get the data in real time. We can make sure the machines are calibrated so that we’re adding these nutrients to the flour in the correct recommended dosage, and if the machine is broken we can go out there and fix it really quickly.”
Felix Brooks-church says Project Healthy Children, which began in Nepal in 2010 before moving to Tanzania, is now known as Sanku, the name of the village in Tibet where the machine first worked. “We celebrated and we honour that moment, that day, so we named the organisation after that village.”
He says philanthropy is critical at this stage of the charity’s development. “We’re still small – 60 employees – and reaching 3 million people, but we have plans to reach 100 million people.” The Life You Can Save estimates that a donation of $500 to Sanku can provide almost 300 people with food-based micronutrient fortification for a year.
Bespoke charity GiveDirectly is all about effectively directing money. It lets donors send cash to poor households in low-income countries and to people affected by humanitarian crises.
Aline Fernicka knows first-hand how life-changing that cash boost can be. After her family fled Burundi for Rwanda in 2015 life was tough enough.
“We rented a one-bedroom apartment for all of us: boys, girls, and our mother were sleeping together in the same room with dishes, pans, and a stove,” she says.
Aline Fernicka, from recipient to field officer with Give Directly in Rwanda. Image courtesy of GiveDirectly.org
Then, in March 2020, Covid struck. None of them could work and Aline’s mother developed stress-related asthma. A call from GiveDirectly, offering support, changed everything.
“At first, we thought they were con artists, but a few weeks later, we received the first transfer of US$46, we knew that they were a serious organisation,” Aline says. “In July, we received our final instalment of US$107. At that time, my mother had contracted Covid-19, so we used the first transfer to buy her asthma medications, food, and fruits that were recommended by doctors to help with her treatment.”
GiveDirectly says 89 cents of every dollar donated makes it into a household, with recipients able to use money for whatever is most important to them. Research and policy non-profit Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) evaluated its Kenya program and found household increases in expenditure across all categories measured, including food, medical and education expenses, durables, home improvement and social events.
This result correlates with a large body of research from around the world documenting the impacts of cash transfers on low-income households. Such research has also showed that extra household cash does not lead to an increase in spending on tobacco, alcohol, or gambling, and that, if anything, recipients spend less on alcohol and tobacco after receiving cash transfers.
Aline now works for GiveDirectly as a field officer in Kigali, registering new recipients to help them get over the poverty line. She says her own experience gives her extra understanding of the impact of receiving immediate cash support in difficult times.
“You cannot imagine the happiness and hope that a recipient gets when they receive cash to improve their lives. They have hope of a better future for their children and their family.”
Download a free copy of Peter Singer’s book, and make a tax-deductible donation to one of The Life You Can Save’s recommended charities before the end of this financial year.
