Agrilinks

This blog, authored by Joel Moktar, Songbae Lee, and Adina Kuncz, highlights the guidance and tool developed to address the growing challenges in global nutrition. The nutrition-lens investing framework and accompanying tool offer clear criteria for assessing and enhancing the nutrition impact of investments. The global nutrition landscape today is marked by complex challenges, which have worsened due to the triple crises of climate change, conflict, and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Melissa Sikwila is a dual-qualified solicitor advocate and dynamic business visionary who has seamlessly blended her legal acumen and strategic intuition to develop sustainable renewable energy and gas-to-power projects across Africa. Boasting nearly a decade of multi-jurisdictional expertise in commercial law, project finance, mergers, taxation and corporate governance, Melissa has been instrumental in multimillion-dollar undertakings.

By Meeri Kim Growing up as a young girl in Lagos, Nigeria, Nkem Torimiro had a dream of becoming a doctor to save lives. But she hit a bump in the road after high school, when the University of Port-Harcourt offered her admission to study botany instead of medicine. She accepted the offer, but with her heart still set on a career in human health.

The Feed the Future Business Drivers for Food Safety (BD4FS) project, implemented by Food Enterprise Solutions (FES), has been a cornerstone in enhancing food safety practices and technologies among Growing Food Businesses (GFBs) in Senegal, Nepal, and Ethiopia over its five years of operation. Through partnerships with local food businesses, BD4FS has gained invaluable insights into the barriers, drivers, and incentives for adopting food safety measures.

Each year, USAID joins our partners in celebrating World Food Safety Day on June 7th with a month-long focus on the importance of food safety and the work, resources and tools carried out by our food safety partners. In a world where 735 million people go to bed hungry every night and 420,000 die from unsafe food every year, we simply can’t afford to lose food to contamination and spoilage.

By Lorenzo Alegria Estades, Jonathan Bauchet, Kajal Gulati, and Jacob Ricker-Gilbert (Purdue University) The relationship between fruit and vegetable cold storage and post-harvest loss reduction is well understood. Proper cold storage increases the storage life and preserves the quality and nutritiousness of perishable products. Additionally, it provides farmers in developing countries with an opportunity to increase their income by allowing them to sell when prices are more favorable.

We expect to be eating peanuts, not extreme amounts of aflatoxins, and chicken but not E. coli. We expect that our salads are washed with clean water, and that the person who prepared the salad first washed their hands. We cannot, however, always assume the expected and thus need to be ready for the unexpected. Unexpected events can take the form of natural disasters, such as earthquakes or floods. They might also come from power cuts or amid sudden political change.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), each year worldwide, unsafe food causes 600 million cases of foodborne diseases and 420,000 deaths[1]. Children under 5 years of age are at particularly high risk of foodborne diseases, with 125,000 children dying from foodborne diseases every year. Food safety is a major public health and economic problem in low-and middle-income (LMIC) with limited understanding of downstream impacts on nutrition and livelihoods.

Welcome to the fifth annual Food Safety Month on Agrilinks!  Each year, Feed the Future, the U.S. government’s global hunger initiative, joins our partners in celebrating World Food Safety Day on June 7th with a month-long focus on the importance of food safety and the work, resources and tools carried out by our food safety partners.

As the Generating Resilience and Opportunities (GROW) commitment notes, USAID “aims to deepen and scale its programming to reach, benefit, and empower more women around the world,” yet the evidence base on which approaches have the greatest impact, and under what conditions, is still emerging.