“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. The dilemma for the charity was how to make that happen. “And there’s a relatively simple solution: these children need more vitamins and minerals in their diet.” “Eight thousand children every single day under the age of five pass away,” Brooks-church says. Hidden hunger has a devastating effect on children. A small child’s immune system can be very fragile.” “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. “They aren’t suffering from starvation due to a lack of food,” he says. and there’s a relatively simple solution Felix Brooks-churchĬo-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. Eight thousand children every single day under the age of five pass away. It works with village mills, adding essential vitamins to the locally milled flour with a high-tech, centrally monitored machine called a dosifier. One such organisation is Sanku – Project Healthy Children, which has zeroed in on the problem of poor nutrition in developing countries. 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. These are the types of charities that people should support, according to a growing movement that promotes effective giving. 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. In Krista’s case, the profit she made paid her children’s school fees. He says better harvests improve the quality of a family’s life in many less obvious ways too. 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. 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. One Acre Fund provides Kenyan farmers the means to increase crop and harvest quality

The life that you can save