Catapult kicked off 2010 with a new design session with Project Healthy Children (PHC).  PHC works with governments and private industry to establish food fortification and supplementation programs that improve the health of women and children around the world.  Catapult, PHC and Stanford University hosted a joint design session to review two promising technologies developed by student teams in Stanford’s Design for Extreme Affordability: a water pump attachment that doses out micro-nutrient during water collection and an attachment for milling machines that doses out micro-nutrient while grains are processed.  From PHC’s website on the new initiative:

In the developing world, a significant portion of the population is rural. Villagers tend to grow their own cereal grains, such as maize or sorghum and mill the raw grains in small community mills. These community mills are typically powered by water or diesel/electricity and the cereal flour produced is consumed as a staple food. Community mills therefore present an excellent opportunity to extend the delivery of micronutrients to a large number of rural people through the small scale fortification (SSF) of cereal flour during grain processing.

In conjunction with our partners, The Micronutrient Initiative, Stanford University and with funding from the Ansara Family Fund, PHC is undertaking groundbreaking work in designing a program to broadly implement small scale fortification. Small scale fortification promises to be one of the most significant break-through technologies in reaching the rural populations where the need is greatest. The promise so far is unmet due to the health community’s inability to solve the social and economic questions associated with rolling out a broader program.