Sanku-Project Healthy Children (East African Countries)

Sanku, a non-profit social enterprise, aims to end malnutrition by equipping small mills with everything they need to add vital nutrients to maize flour, an East African staple.

Every day, 8,000 children die and 2 billion people suffer from preventable illnesses because their diets lack essential vitamins and minerals. Fortification (i.e. adding life-saving micronutrients to food during processing) is one of the most cost-effective nutritional interventions. Despite this, it fails to reach the 6.5 billion people in developing countries who rely on small, often rural mills for most of their food.

Sanku developed technology and a business model to help these small mills, that feed the most malnourished people, to conveniently and affordably fortify staple grains.

Since 2021/2022, the Eurofins Foundation has been contributing to the programme “Ending micronutrient malnutrition for 4 million East Africans through sustainable access to fortified flour”.

In 2023 alone, funding allowed Sanku to successfully pilot the program in Kenya, in preparation for the scale-up phase. During this grant period, they:

Installed 103 Sanku Dosifiers at 95 mills, to provide 2.9 million people with access to fortified flour every day. After over a decade of refining their model, replication in other markets is being done, positioning them well for rapid scale across the region.
Partnered with key government agencies to work collaboratively towards: (1) Raising awareness on the importance of fortification, (2) training millers and health/nutrition officers on fortification accuracy and compliance to fortification standards, and (3) developing the right policy and regulatory framework to support fortification. Sanku is in the final stages of signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the Kenyan Ministry of Health and have been a part of key policy discussions within the Kenya National Food Fortification Alliance (KNFFA) - the government body mandated to implement the country’s national fortification strategy.
Developed a new dosifier design better suited for Kenyan “roller mills” - this will be a much more compact design compared to previous versions (and hence more cost-effective to manufacture), and will have additional premix sensors and a “smart” alert system to monitor premix levels more proactively, and improve consistent dosing accuracy.

In 2023/2024, the Eurofins Foundation renews its support to this initiative.

This project contributes to the following United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals

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