How we can help hungry kids one text at a time Su Kahumbu
I want to introduce you
to my badass friends.
Meet Thelma and Louise.
(Laughter)
I’m passionate about cows.
And although they’ve been
getting a lot of crap lately
due to methane emissions
and climate change,
I hope that I can redeem
their reputation in part
by showing you how
incredibly important they are
in solving one of the world’s
biggest problems: food security.
But more importantly, for Africa –
it’s resultant childhood stunting.
Nutritional stunting manifests itself
in a reduction of growth rate
in human development.
And according to UNICEF,
stunting doesn’t come easy.
It doesn’t come quickly.
It happens over a long period of time
during which a child endures painful
and debilitating cycles of illness,
depressed appetite,
insufficient nutrition
and inadequate care.
And most kids simply
can’t endure such rigors.
But those that do survive,
they carry forward
long-term cognitive problems
as well as losses of stature.
The numbers of stunted children
under the age of five,
in most regions of the world,
has been declining.
And I really hate to say this,
but the only place where
they haven’t been declining is here,
in Africa.
Here, 59 million children,
three in 10 in that age group,
struggle to meet
their genetic potential –
their full genetic potential.
Protein is one of our most important
dietary requirements,
and evidence shows
that lack of essential amino acids,
the building blocks of proteins,
in young children’s diets,
can result in stunting.
Essential amino acids are called essential
because we can’t
synthesize them in our bodies.
We have to get them from our foods
and the best sources are animal-derived:
milk, meat and eggs.
Most protein consumed
on the African continent is crop-based.
And although we have millions
of smallholder farmers rearing animals,
livestock production
is not as easy as we think.
The big livestock gaps between
rich countries and poor countries
are due to poor animal health.
Endemic livestock diseases,
some of them transmissible to humans,
threaten not only livestock producers
in those poor countries,
but all human health across all countries.
This is a global pathogens network.
It shows the pathogens
found across the world
according to the Enhanced
Infectious Diseases database.
And it shows those pathogens
that share hosts.
In a nutshell,
we share pathogens, and thus diseases,
with the species we live closest to:
our livestock.
And we call these zoonotic diseases.
Recent reports show
that the deadly dozen zoonotic
diseases kill 2.2 million people
and sicken 2.4 billion people annually.
And Jimmy says,
“The greatest burden of zoonoses
falls on one billion
poor livestock keepers.”
We totally underestimate
the importance of our smallholder farmers.
We’re beginning to recognize
how important they are
and how they influence our medical health,
our biosafety
and more recently,
our cognitive and our physical health.
They stand at the frontline
of zoonotic epidemics.
They pretty much underpin our existence.
And they need to know so much,
yet most lack knowledge
on livestock disease
prevention and treatment.
So how do they learn?
Apart from shared experiences,
trial and error,
conventional farming extension services
are boots on the ground and radio –
expensive and hard to scale
in the face of population growth.
Sounds pretty gloomy, doesn’t it?
But we’re at an interesting
point in Africa.
We’re changing that narrative
using innovative solutions,
riding across scalable technologies.
Knowledge doesn’t have to be expensive.
My company developed
an agricultural platform called iCow.
We teach farmers
best livestock practices using SMS
over simple, low-end phones.
Farmers receive three SMSs a week
on best livestock practices,
and those that execute the messages
go on to see increases in productivity
within as short a time as three months.
The first increases in productivity,
of course, are improved animal health.
We use SMS because it is retentive.
Farmers store their messages,
they write them down in books,
and in effect,
we’re drip-feeding
agricultural manuals into the fields.
We recognize that we are all
part of the global food network:
producers and consumers,
you and me, and every farmer.
We’re focusing now on trying
to bring together producers and consumers
to take action and take responsibility
for not only food security,
but for food safety.
This beautiful animal is an African-Asian
Sahiwal crossed with a Dutch Fleckvieh.
She’s milkier than her Sahiwal mom,
and she’s sturdier and more resistant
to disease than her Fleckvieh father.
In Ethiopia and Tanzania,
the African Dairy Genetic Gains program
is using SMS and cutting-edge genomics
and pioneering Africa’s first
tropically adapted dairy breeding centers
and dairy performance recording centers.
Farmers contribute
their production data –
milking records,
breeding records and feeding records –
to the ADGG platform.
This stage is synthesized
through algorithms
from some of the top
livestock institutions in the world
before it lands back in the farmers' hands
in actionable SMSs.
Customized data,
customized responses
all aimed at increasing productivity
based on the potential on the ground.
We’re at a very interesting place
in agriculture in Africa.
By the end of this year,
we’ll have almost one billion
mobile phone subscriptions.
We have the power in our hands
to ensure that livestock production
systems are not only healthy,
productive and profitable,
but that farmers are knowledgeable,
and more importantly,
that our farmers are safe.
Working with smallholder farmers
is one of the best ways
to guarantee food security.
Working with smallholder farmers
is one of the best ways
to guarantee each and every child
their full opportunity
and ability to reach
their full genetic potential.
And harnessing the power
of millions of smallholder farmers
and their badass cows like mine,
we should be able to bring
a halt to stunting in Africa.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you.