Tag Archives: Gates Foundation

Easy Milkshakes a Kid Can Make

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Once a week we will be featuring a fun and/or educational activity you can try at home or in the classroom. This week, we announced  that we have received an $8.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to continue one of our biggest projects, – the East Africa Dairy Development project. It was started in 2008 with a $42.8 million grant from the Gates Foundation and is helping about 179,000 small-scale dairy farmers to double their incomes. The grant will support existing projects in Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda and explore possibilities for expansion in Ethiopia and Tanzania.

EADDP (East African Dairy Development Program) Metkei Multipurpose Company Ltd.To help us celebrate this great news and cool off a bit, make a healthy milkshake –  easy enough for a kid to make – with one of these great recipes from Kate Miller on http://www.nichetopics.info/easy-milkshake-recipes-for-kids.html.

Apple Milkshake: 1 apple (cored, peeled and chopped), 1 glass milk, 1 tablespoon sugar, 2-3 scoops vanilla ice cream, and ice cubes.

Banana Kiwi Milkshake: 1 kiwi (peeled and cut into small pieces), 1 overripe banana (sliced up), 1 glass milk, 1 tablespoon sugar, 2-3 scoops vanilla ice cream, and ice cubes.

Berry Fruit Milkshake: 1 handful berries (such as strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and blackberries), 1 glass milk, 2-3 scoops ice cream (strawberry, raspberry or vanilla taste great in this easy kids milkshake recipe), and ice cubes

Vanilla Malt Milkshake: 1 teaspoon vanilla malt powder, 1 glass milk, 1 tablespoon sugar, 2-3 scoops vanilla ice cream, ice cubes.  (You can also tweak the vanilla malt milkshake by adding chocolate, berries, peaches or whatever fruits that your children love.

Here are a few tips to make the best milkshakes with your children:

Add milk to the blender first, followed by ice cream together with other ingredients, and then blend. Blend a little less if you prefer fruity chunks in the milkshake. If you want thicker milkshakes, add less milk than the recipe calls for.

Additionally, you want to use chilled milk and rock hard ice cream to create refreshingly cool milk shakes. It’s also a great idea to place the glasses in the refrigerator before filling them.

If you want to make milkshakes without blender, try the old-fashioned way by combining all the ingredients in a sealed container and shake really hard, until thoroughly mixed and frothy.

Learn more about the East Africa Dairy Development project on the Gates Foundation website, or read about dairy in Heifer International projects on the Heifer blog.

Heifer Gets $8.5 Million From Gates Foundation for Africa Dairy Work

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One of Heifer International’s biggest projects is EADD – the East Africa Dairy Development project. It was started in 2008 with a $42.8 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It’s helping about 179,000 small-scale dairy farmers to double their incomes.

The Kosgei family in Nandi County, Kenya, are participants in the East Africa Dairy Development project.

Now, we’re happy to announce that we’ve received a one-year, $8.5 million grant from the Gates Foundation to continue that work. The grant will support existing projects in Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda and explore possibilities for expansion in Ethiopia and Tanzania.

Transporters in Uganda pour a day's milk into containers at a farmers' coorperative.

 

“We are excited for the opportunity to continue serving dairy farming families and grateful to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for their support,” says Elizabeth Bintliff, vice president of Heifer International’s Africa area program.

So what, exactly does EADD do? The project helps small dairy farmers sustainably increase their milk productivity and efficiency. It also helps them sell more milk by connecting to markets and by creating and expanding infrastructure like collection hubs and chilling plants.

EADD is now in its final year of the pilot phase. It has grown to be one of the leading market-oriented agro-livestock development initiatives in East Africa, earning the farming families more than $35 million.

Heifer International is implementing the project, with help from partners TechnoServe, The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), World Agroforestry Research Institute and Africa Breeders Services.

Sustainable Stick People

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What better way to illustrate the story of sustainable farming than with animated stick people? I really enjoyed the message behind this adorable video Farming First created to share the reasons why we need to make our world economy a green one, and I thought you would, too.

Farming First is a coalition of organizations that promotes practical, actionable activities to further sustainable agricultural development worldwide.

The Gates Foundation also recently selected Farming First’s “The Story of Agriculture and the Green Economy” as the best infographic as part of its Small Farmers Challenge this summer.

Click here to browse the online graphic. Let us know what you think!

In East Africa, Farmers Become Entrepreneurs

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The Kiboga West Dairy Plant, which processes 8,000 litres of milk per day and serves 1,500 farmers

This morning, Moses Nyabila shared a remarkable story of transformation that’s taking place in Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda through Heifer’s East Africa Dairy Development (EADD) project. Moses has been the regional director for EADD since 2008, and he spoke to a diverse group of representatives of numerous non-governmental organizations and agencies at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) offices in Washington, DC.

The EADD program began in 2008 when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded a five-year, $42.8 million grant to Heifer with the goal of doubling the income of 179,000 farming families in three East African countries over 10 years. EADD is now in its fourth year, and we’re analyzing the program’s results and discussing phase two of the project.

And the results are impressive, to say the least. Here are some key points from Moses’s presentation:
  • Before the program, millions of dairy farmers were disfranchised, without any say in the direction of the dairy industry in their area. Now, 142,000 farmers are mobilized into more than 3,000 active communities of producers.
  • In the past, few women were willing to take up leadership positions within their communities. After implementation of EADD, 26 percent of the program’s local leaders are women. 
  • Before EADD, less than 10 percent of farmers in the three EADD countries banked or had access to credit. Now, 80 percent of the 90,000 participant farmers in Kenya have bank accounts in communities once considered too poor for sound investing or bank financing.

At today’s event, Heifer CEO Pierre Ferrari told the attendees about his trip this past December to visit some of the EADD projects. Pierre holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, and he said he was impressed with the farmers he met. Through EADD, these burgeoning entrepreneurs were selling their surplus milk and participating in the regional economy. “The rapidity at which they were learning and implementing these business practices was remarkable,” Pierre said.

You can join an ongoing conversation about food security and related issues at USAID’s new Agrilinks Blog. There, you can also view and download today’s presentation.

And now it’s your turn. Should programs like this East Africa dairy initiative be implemented elsewhere? Could this same model be applied to other food commodities? Leave your ideas in the comments below.   

Smallholder Farmers Are the Answer

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Farmers pedal away after delivering milk to the Kiboga West Livestock Cooperative chilling plant in Uganda.

Today on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation blog, Bill Gates makes a powerful statement: Smallholder farmers are the solution to the global hunger epidemic.

We agree wholeheartedly. Since its inception in 1944, Heifer International’s mission has been to end hunger and poverty by working directly with smallholder farmers, providing gifts of livestock and training that improve nutrition and cultivate individual entrepreneurship.

But, why farming? Gates explains in his post...

“Many people don’t realize it, but most of the world’s poorest people are small farmers. They get their food and income farming small plots of land. These farming families often don’t have good seeds, equipment, reliable markets, or money to invest that helps them get the most out of their land. So they work hard, but they get no traction, and more often than not, they stay hungry and poor.”

He goes on to state, “smart investments in farming families help them become more self sufficient.” Heifer’s model of sustainable development has proven this approach works.

This is a message the world needs to hear, and we need your help in sharing it. The Gates Foundation is issuing a challenge for you to create a compelling message – using your design, film making, or writing skills – that shows why investing in small farmers is good for the world, then submit your work for possible inclusion in the Gates Foundation website, blog or social media platforms. 

How would you share this message? Please share your ideas in the comments.

Heifer CEO Pierre Ferrari in Winning TEDxChange Lineup

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Heifer CEO Pierre Ferrari is part of a winning lineup for a “Build Your Own TEDxChange” contest organized by GOOD in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, GOOD announced this week.
You can see highlights from the GOOD announcement below or read more on their web site.
The winner is Chandra Wroblewski, whose lineup—Muhammad Yunus, Michelle Rhee, Pierre Ferrari, and Anders Wilhelmson (with musical guest Arcade Fire)—had the most exciting and topical selection of speakers. On top of that, it has an amazing idea audience interaction: social network gaming.
Wroblewski explains her selections in her pitch to GOOD:
I was looking for an interesting mix of people to cover all areas that are important for global development and health. At first, someone might listen to these speakers’ stories and say “What were you thinking?” That, to me, makes it more interesting and shows they are truly thinking outside the box.

* Give money to people who might not pay you back?
* Shake up bureaucracy for student development?
* Create a poop bag? For… people?
* Free cows? Overseas?

My line-up features people of different trades, nationalities, locations, gender, ages, and causes – but they all have one thing in common, which is to believe in the potential of all people in the world. Each speaker’s ideas and approach to change betters the global community – improving education, creating opportunities, finding simple solutions, believing in one another, and lending a helping hand.

Additionally, I particularly like this line-up because all these speakers are smart, educated, very fortunate people that could have simply worked to make money, but made something more. If you listen to their stories you’ll notice they didn’t anticipate being where they are today — Rhee, expected maybe to be a doctor. Yunus, always surprised about the new venture. Wilhemson, an architect by trade. Ferrari, making plenty of money at Coca-Cola. They all took their time and talents to create unique, sometimes controversial, solutions to help people near and far.

Let us know what you think about this lineup. We’ll share more details here as soon as we have them.

Is Malaria Eradication the Right Goal?

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Back in 2007, the contemporary titans of development funding, Bill and Melinda Gates, called for the global eradication of malaria. Remember when Bill unleashed supposedly malarial mosquitos on an audience at TED (5:05)?
Surely malaria eradication a good thing, right? The WHO thought so, and they got on board. But a new series of papers published in the journal Lancet is not as gungho.
The Guardian‘s Global Health blog has a good synopsis of the findings:
“The most startling paper … is an analysis by Oliver Sabot and colleagues from the Clinton Health Access Initiative in Boston, USA, who take a hard-headed look at the relative costs in four impoverished malaria-endemic countries of eliminating the mosquito-borne disease, versus controlling it. They found that there was a only a small probability (less than 10%) that elimination would be cost-saving over 50 years in three of those countries … and a moderate chance in the other. …
“The other problem they found was that funding for malaria control at the moment is geared to bringing down the numbers of cases rapidly – good in itself, but not the way things have to go if elimination is the goal. …
“All this is not to say that elimination should no longer be contemplated. It’s just more possible in some countries than in others. …”

The Root (Vegetables) of Success

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It may be the cooler weather or my own insatiable appetite for the orange-fleshed tubers, but I liked this video from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation about a Tanzanian farmer building a better livelihood with a new crop—sweet potatoes.

Read about Heifer International’s own work in sub-Saharan Africa made possible by a grant from the Gates Foundation.

A New Nonprofit Model? Coke Is It.

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In her work with the Gates Foundation, Melinda French Gates visits loads of places in developing countries where people have no electricity, no running water, no decent shelter. “I’m startled by all the things that they don’t have,” she said during a TEDx talk last month. “But I’m surprised by the one thing that they do have: Coca-Cola. Coke is everywhere.”

And so Gates set out to study why the Coca-Cola Company can get their products to remote places never blessed with necessities like vaccines and toilets. “If they can do that, why can’t governments and NGOs do the same thing?” she wondered.

Gates identified the three keys to Coke’s success, and nonprofits who struggle to serve people in far-flung places would do well to take note. Tracking and using real-time data, tapping into local entrepreneurial talent and marketing strategically have made Coke products a hot commodity around the globe. Just imagine what the world would look like if quality health care, education and food security were as in demand and easily available to everyone.

Heifer International is partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in East Africa to help dairy farmers improve milk production and distribution. Learn more about the project here.

Gates Foundation Sponsors ABC News Series on Diseases That Affect the Poor

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“World News” anchor Diane Sawyer and Dr. Richard Besser, ABC’s medical editor, are leading a new yearlong ABC News series on the diseases and health conditions that disproportionately affect the world’s poorest people. Inadequate newborn care, malaria, polio, HIV, tuberculosis and a lack of critical vaccines are among the global topics to be covered.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is giving a $1.5 million grant that will help fund the cost of the series, and ABC News will invest more than $4.5 million in the project.
“We believe that great storytelling can inform decisions that could help to save lives,” said Kate James, chief communications officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The series, called “Be the Change: Save a Life” will begin in December and continue throughout 2011. It will include reporting from all ABC News anchors across all broadcasts and platforms. Read more about the series on ABC’s website.