How fortified flour is fighting hunger and saving lives

Child malnutrition continues to be one of the most critical health challenges across the world’s hungriest countries. It’s not just about getting kids enough to eat, but also about ensuring that they get all the nutrients they need as their bodies grow and develop. 

With limited resources, farmers living below the poverty line tend to focus on growing just a few crops, such as corn, rice, and millet. This can leave children missing out on key micronutrients like Vitamin A and iron - and potentially facing a lifetime of impacts from those early nutrient deficiencies. 

We can diversify the crops that farmers grow. But we can also work with the crops they already have and enhance them through biofortification. These methods, as the World Health Organisation reports, increase the content of essential nutrients in food, improving nutritional quality and providing a public health benefit - all with minimal risk. This often looks like enriching crops with nutrients they already have, like sweet potatoes with vitamin A, and beans with iron.

Enriched and fortified flours are also among the most time-tested examples of these methods, with roots going back to the rationing era in World War II. They’re easy to produce and effective for delivering more crucial vitamins and minerals. You likely see versions of these super flours each time you go to the grocery store. 

Flour is especially good for children as it’s an ingredient that mothers often use when weaning their babies off of breastmilk. Many mothers will make a simple porridge out of flour for breakfast every morning. On its own, it doesn’t meet the nutritional needs for children under the age of two. (The first 1,000 days of a child’s life are filled with the highest nutritional needs per body mass in a person’s lifetime.) 

However, with some simple fortification techniques, it can be a nutritional powerhouse.

The downside: Commercially-available versions of fortified flour are not always available in the countries that need them most. If they are available, they’re often prohibitively expensive. 

The good news from this, however, is that the flours themselves aren’t expensive to produce, especially when using locally-available raw materials. The Misola Project began testing this in 1982, prototyping a super flour made from local products and using traditional methods in Burkina Faso. They described it as a local solution to a national issue. 

The recipe they landed on consists of three basic staples: millet or corn, soybeans, and groundnuts - three local and popular crops. Together, they form a flour that delivers on key nutrients and meets the standards recommended by the WHO. In 2005, Misola opened its first processing unit in Niger. 

In 2018, Concern Niger launched PAFAN, a project designed to improve food and nutrition security for participating families, while also promoting local manufacturers working with biofortification in the Tahoua region. 

PAFAN is what led us to partner with Misola. We worked together to establish a processing facility in Tahoua, connected local farmers growing millet and other key crops to Misola, and trained the women hired to work in the center on both producing the flour and marketing it locally. Concern also went to work promoting the fortified flour as part of its emergency food aid distributions. During these distributions, we provided a cooking demonstration to show parents and caregivers how to use the flour to make porridge. 

One of those parents was Aminatou Abdoulaye. Over the course of four months, Abdoulaye received 25kg of flour for her 10-month-old son, who was frequently ill as a result of nutritional deficiencies. It was easy enough to cook, and made a world of difference for her youngest. “He is doing better these days,” she said when we checked in with her some months later. “He now smiles at his brothers and sisters, eats well, and drinks lots of water.” 

Between 2018 and 2021, our partnership with Misola contributed to a 3.2% reduction in acute malnutrition and a 6.6% increase in minimum dietary diversity in Tahoua. Misola was also able to expand its business in the region to meet production demand - which, as a bonus, created more jobs for local women, who now produce 3 tonnes of flour every day. 

Yet, while Misola has a sizable presence across seven countries in the Sahel and central Africa, there was more to be done. What’s more, the system they created was such that it could be replicated around the world. 

In 2021, Concern tested out a similar project in Haiti, where AK-1000 flour is known as a gold standard fortified flour amid rising hunger rates (UNICEF estimates that 25% of the country’s children face consistently high levels of hunger). Following the Misola model of combining local grains and legumes, we created a version of AK-1000 flour that packs a punch: Every 100 grams provides 50% of daily energy needs, 72% of proteins, 53% of fats, and 34% of iron, B1, and folate. 

Like Misola’s model, Concern also worked with communities in Haiti to produce and launch this new flour in the country’s capital of Port-au-Prince. We set up 14 parents’ clubs across 14 neighbourhoods in the city, training participants on how to make and cook the flour and providing them with the equipment they needed. This included a mill provided to each neighbourhood, which is managed and maintained by elected members of the parents’ groups. 

“Before the training, I didn't know that we could produce such nutritious food for our children locally,” says one programme participant, a father from Cité Soleil. “As a father, I am proud to be able to take direct action against malnutrition and provide a sustainable solution for my community.” 

Circumstances in Haiti have changed, unfortunately for the worse, since 2021. However many of the parents’ clubs are still, after the official project wrapped, able to maintain and produce their own fortified flour and sell within their communities. (With the right funding, our aim is to help the other groups to do the same.) 

Bolstered by the success in Haiti, we’re now developing a similar super flour programme in the Central African Republic, where levels of child malnutrition have increased by 30% since 2023. Like the Haiti programme, Central African participants have learned how to produce the flour and received the equipment needed to make it monthly. They also have community-led committees to manage and maintain the mills. 

The results are early but promising: Mothers have told us that the super flour tastes better than the flour they had previously been using, and it’s popular with their children. Communities appreciate both the support for the mill and the links that this programme is making with local farmers (whose crops are sourced and have improved in recent years thanks to Climate Smart Agriculture).

Much like the flours themselves, it’s these kinds of integrated programmes that are leading the way towards a possible future without hunger, bringing together different sectors and their strengths to make a whole far greater than the sum of its parts. 

“The super flour is a simple solution to one of the most pressing problems in these countries,” says Sinead O’Reilly, Concern’s Head of Health Support. “Concern’s programmes are designed to facilitate knowledge sharing amongst communities so that resilience against malnutrition can continue to build after Concern’s programmes conclude.”