Gone are the days when we used to wait on foreign inventions and products to help curb hunger and malnutrition in Africa.
Jolenta Joseph from Tanzania, who recently won an international award for fighting hunger, is making nutritious food affordable for low-income earners and the less privileged.
With her business starting from humble beginnings, the 29-year-old agro-entrepreneur and nutritionist has managed to bring solutions to end ‘hidden hunger’ in the community of Morogoro where she is based, and in Tanzania as a whole.
The World Health Organization classifies hidden hunger as the deficiency of essential nutrients due to eating a diet that lacks all required nutrients, especially vitamins and minerals.
Initially when Jolenta started off in 2017, she supplied fresh orange-fleshed sweet potatoes (OFSP). She would sell them to local markets until she started drying and milling them herself with the help of SEGUCO.
In a video on SEGUCO’s blog site, Jolenta narrated how she uses solar incubators to dry the sweet potatoes and mill then sell to other processors who use the ingredient for their products. When she started then, she could not even afford to package her own products.
Over the past three years, Jolenta has managed to increase her production and developed a brand called Sanavita. She grew from supplying 200 kilograms of processed sweet potatoes per week to 600 kilograms.
Sanavita is no longer just limited to orange sweet potatoes but also includes sorghum and maize flour. Jolenta’s products are highly nutritious and suitable for pregnant and lactating women and infants.
OFSP are rich in beta-carotene, which our bodies turn into vitamin A, and are considered an important biofortified crop in many developing countries in alleviating Vitamin A malnutrition. The World Health Organization estimates that each year, 670,000 children will die from Vitamin A deficiency while around 350,000 children will go blind from Vitamin A deficiency.
Jolenta is helping promote healthier diets at a lower cost and is at the same time creating business opportunities for the impoverished farmers who grow OFSP. Her award came along with a “cash prize of US$10,000 and a prestigious mentorship award dubbed the Food Technology Innovation Prize issued by the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN),” reported Anadolu Agency.
Phoebie Shamiso Chigonde is a journalist passionate about gender equality, social development programmes and grassroots-based solution seeking initiatives. She has a passion for women and community development. Phoebie is also a radio personality at a regional commercial radio station, a platform that enables her to network with like-minded women, journalists and activists as she continues to document and tell the story of the ordinary woman from the lens of that very ordinary woman.