Bill Gates, BMZ finance food nutrition project in Ghana

Bill Gates
Bill Gates

The Affordable Nutritious Food for Women (ANF4W) project was launched on Monday  to increase local supply and demand of nutritious foods, currently lacking in markets around the world.

The launch, aimed at setting the ANF4W project in a wider Ghanaian nutrition landscape, was to share ANF4w project objectives and activities, and to establish stakeholder relationship.

The project focuses on women of reproductive age.

The ANF4W project is co-financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the German Federal Ministry of Economic Co-operation and Development (BMZ), with Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale  Zusammenarbeit  (GIZ), as  co-ordinators for implementation and DSM’S Sight and Life, a humanitarian  nutrition think tank as private partners.

“Currently, an estimated two billion people are affected by “hidden hunger,” which has a detrimental effect on people’s health, productivity and life expectancy, ” said the project co-ordinator, Sarah Lena Jensen.

“Hidden Hunger” micronutrient malnutrition refers to the insufficient intake of essential vitamins and minerals, she said.

In Ghana the ANF4W component pilot phase would run from 2013 to 2015,  to create a culturally appropriate, affordable food proto-type for women in reproductive age based on the natural food sources and fortified with relevant micro-nutrients.

The proto-type, to be developed and produced by local Ghanaian food processing industries in addition to an unbranded social marketing strategy targeted  at women in the reproductive age, would be implemented in order to increase their overall nutrition awareness.

Speaking at the launch, Dr Edith Tetteh, Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Government Focal Point said, in 2010 the United Nation Secretary General set up the SUN  to bridge the malnutrition gap

She said apart from women of reproductive age, emphasis  was also on the first 1,000 days of a child (that is from conception to age two), and added that the initiative had came in handy and timely.

She lauded the culturally sensitive and affordable nature of the initiative, in that in Ghana most women are the last to have their meals, because culturally women are not highly placed.

The initiative, she noted, should be able to tag women on their produce to make it achieve its set target, and help Ghana reduce malnutrition to the barest minimum.

Mr Klaus Kraemer, Director, DSM Sight and Life said it focuses on advanced knowledge and science in nutrition, sharing of best practices with a broader audience in nutrition programmes, and the use of all best evidence for advocacy to keep nutrition high on national agenda.

Source: GNA

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