The NutriHarvest project is a 36-month initiative supported by Cargill to increase access to nutritious food and build farmer capacity for improved livelihoods in India, Kenya, Tanzania, and Guatemala. The project aims to reach over 119,000 farmers, enhancing their capacity and resilience and delivering over 17 million nutritious meals across the target countries.
Globally, around two billion people worldwide suffer from micronutrient deficiencies, leading to serious health issues, including stunting, night blindness, impaired brain development, weakened immunity, and even death. These deficiencies are fundamentally caused by diets heavily reliant on staple crops that lack the diversity needed to meet nutrient requirements.
Increasing access to nutrient-rich foods—such as biofortified staple crops, opportunity nutrient-dense crops, and animal-sourced foods—is critical to ensuring all people receive the nutrients they need to survive and thrive. With funding from Cargill, the NutriHarvest project aims to improve food security, dietary diversity, and nutrition security through the promotion of biofortified crops, opportunity crops, and poultry.
NutriHarvest will improve farmer livelihoods and food and nutrition security in the communities served. The project is focused on three key areas:
- Increasing the production and consumption of ‘opportunity’ crops: HarvestPlus will work with seed companies and farmers to boost the production and consumption of underutilized, nutrient-dense crops including legumes and vitamin A sweet potatoes in Kenya and Tanzania.
- Enriching Home Grown School Feeding: HarvestPlus will implement an end-to-end delivery system to facilitate biofortified seed production and distribution to rural farming households, and link nutritious grains and food production to schools. This approach ensures sufficient supply while creating demand through awareness campaigns and home-grown school feeding procurement, leading to a sustainable increase in production and consumption. We will incorporate iron beans into school feeding programs in Kenya and Tanzania, iron pearl millet and zinc wheat into school feeding programs in India, and zinc maize and iron beans into a food bank serving schools in Guatemala.
- Enhancing ‘Hatching Hope’ Farmer Capacity: In India, HarvestPlus will strengthen backyard poultry farmers’ capacity through the Hatching Hope initiative, which was launched in 2018 by Cargill with founding partner Heifer International. The project will train and support farmers, especially women, to adopt better poultry farming practices to improve their household nutrition and drive local economic impact.
By adopting an ecosystem approach, NutriHarvest will deliver nutrient-dense foods to rural households in targeted communities, while sustainably building local supply chains.
The NutriHarvest project is driven by the belief that empowering farmers to produce, utilize, and market nutritious and opportunity crops while improving their crop and livestock farming skills, helps them become agents of change. This, in turn, makes nutritious meals available and affordable through local institutional and commercial markets, sparking resilient food system transformations.