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.
The NutriHarvest project will help improve farmer livelihoods, food security and nutrition in the communities served and is focused on three key areas:
- Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils (VACS) initiative: We will increase production and consumption of underutilized nutrient-dense crops. HarvestPlus will work with seed companies and farmers to boost the production and consumption of legumes and vitamin A sweet potatoes in Kenya and Tanzania.
- Home Grown School Feeding: HarvestPlus will implement an end-to-end delivery system to facilitate biofortified seed production and distribution to farming households in local communities, and further linkage of nutritious grains and foods 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.
- Hatching Hope: In India, NutriHarvest will help enhance the capacity of poultry farmers through the Hatching Hope initiative, which was launched in 2018 by Cargill with founding partner Heifer International. The project will provide training 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 addresses the production and consumption of nutrient-dense foods at the household level in targeted communities.
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.