Hope Is A Verb - Felix Brooks Church- How one small machine could end malnutrition in Africa

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

Meet Felix Brooks Church, a social entrepreneur who co-invented a small machine known as a "dosifier," which adds lifesaving nutrients to the staple food of communities in southern Africa. Felix and his team at SANKU have installed over 800 machines in local mills and are on a mission to reach 100 million people by 2030. In this conversation Felix shares his journey from rising gridiron star to inventor and how he dragged his machine across the borders of African countries to test it in local mills. He talks us through the impact of "hidden hunger" and the simple but powerful technology that could eventually end malnutrition, and the potential of fortified maize flour to create a more abundant future. FIND OUT MORE: www.sanku.com www.facebook.com/SankuPHC/ https://www.instagram.com/sankuphc/ We are proud to have SANKU as a Future Crunch charity partner and we’d like to thank our paying newsletter subscribers for their ongoing support. We donate a third of our subscription fees to support under the radar charities that are helping people and the planet. If you’re interested in becoming a subscriber, you can find out more at www.futurecrunch.com This episode of “Hope Is A Verb” was hosted by Angus Hervey, Co-Founder of Future Crunch and Amy Davoren-Rose, Creative Director of Future Crunch. The soundtrack for this podcast is “Rain,” composed and performed by El Rey Miel from their upcoming album "Sea the Sky". Audio sweetening by Anthony Badolato- Ai3 Audio and Voice.  Special thanks to Tane Hunter, Sarah Green, Lisa Taylor, and our wonderful subscribers to the Future Crunch newsletter for helping us to make this happen.  We would like to acknowledge that HOPE IS A VERB is recorded on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung People. These conversations are inspired by our charity partners and our Humankind Project that celebrates the people who are stitching our world back together.  If you want to contact us, send an email at [e-mail] Transcriptions will be available on our website soon.

Hi, welcome to Hope is a Verb, a podcast from Future Crunch that explores what it takes to change the world through conversations with the people that are making it happen. I'm Amy. I'm Gus, and these are the unknown heroes who are mending our planet, stitching together a better future, and showing us the best of what it is to be human. And over the course of a generation, how you can develop a nation, literally through the stomach and through better food, it's quite inspiring how the ripple and those dominoes

spread out over the generation, and in 10 years, how a country will change, because from day one, their citizens have better health and really access to a basic human right we think everyone should have. If you were to name the world's biggest problems, global hunger and malnutrition would be near the top of that list. Over 2 billion people around the world

lack access to adequate nutrition, a problem that results in the unnecessary death of 8,000 children every day. It's a staggering statistic and one that most people find overwhelming. But for Felix Brooks Church, it became his call to action. Felix is a social entrepreneur who invented a small machine known as a dosifier, which adds vitamins, zinc, folic acid, and iron to the flour sold by local millers in Southern Africa. It's simple technology, but the impact is enormous.

Since 2013, Felix and his co-founders have been running an organization called Sanku that has partnered with over 800 local mills to install these dosifiers and add life-saving nutrients to the staple food of hundreds of thousands of people. We're so excited to introduce you to Felix. He's got quite a story to tell. Hey, Felix, welcome to the podcast. It's so lovely to have you here. Hi Amy, great to be here. Thank you. Felix, we like to begin these conversations with all of our guests with a similar question, which is, is there a news story or something happening in the world that is giving you

hope right now? A news story for Sanku is definitely the excitement about potential expansion. We've recently been contacted by the government of Ethiopia and that offers us a chance to reach potentially 100 million people. So we're pretty excited about that. Yeah, wow. I mean, that's enormous. That's a lot of people. Yeah, a lot of people and definitely a lot of people in need in an area that's combating malnutrition. And Sanku definitely has a role there. Before we jump into the work that you're doing with Sanku, we'd like to find out a little bit about you. Tell us where you grew up and what you remember about those early years of your life.

Yeah, I actually was born in Spain, although my parents are American, but they moved to Spain in the early 70s to a small island called Ibiza, which I think now is quite famous. But at the time it was essentially a small little Spanish island where a lot of artists and poets and hippies moved to. So it was a bit of a community there that I grew up in, youngest of three boys. And yeah, my childhood was beautiful, peaceful, and spent most of the time climbing trees and playing on the beaches. And we've traveled a lot as a family when I was younger. I lived in North Africa and Morocco, South America and Peru, throughout Europe, and finally settled back, or rather for me, the first time into the U.S. when I was about, I think, 11 years old, into San Francisco. You know, my first 10 to 15 years was just bouncing between all these magical places. And I guess being exposed to

communities and areas in North Africa and South America was my first kind of glimpse at, you know, poverty and the different things that you might see in those areas. And I remember that as even a child that, you know, there was definitely an inequity there and there was an opportunity to do some good work and that's kind of carried and been with me ever since then and probably one of the reasons why I do what I do. Yeah. Are there any particular moments from your childhood that you look back on now and you think, ah, yep,

that was the moment that the seed was planted? Yeah, there was a few. And one image that's always stuck with me, I'm not sure if I was five or six, I was young. And I remember walking with my mother in the streets of Lima, the capital of Peru, and walking through some areas that were, if I was to go back now, I would say was pretty rough and quite underprivileged as far as what the community had and had to access.

But at the time, I just saw it for what it was. And I saw kids my age and wanted to play with them. But there was definitely something different in the way that they were dressed and the houses they lived in that for me didn't make sense that I had certain things and they didn't have certain things. I couldn't, at that age, my brain couldn't make the rational connection

that there is injustice and there is inequity and not every basic human right is guaranteed to all, although it should. So you started off your career as a graphic designer. I think you also played football to a really high level. What was it that sparked the transition from those pursuits into social entrepreneurship? It was what I guess you call gridiron here. It was American football. For some reason, I said, I want to try out this crazy game where you put on a helmet and run into each other. Looks like fun.

And it was fun. I ended up playing in college as well and got recruited to play professionally. Had a brief stint in, I guess, the semi-pro leagues until an injury. So I only played really one game. But it was good. It was a pivot to say that, you know, sports got me to a certain place. I learned a lot about discipline. I learned about kind of the thresholds of pain and, and what my body could take and mental as well. And that, you know,

I've used what I've learned in football and sports for the rest of my life after university and after the injury and, and, and really the dream of being a professional athlete was no longer there, I fell back on my other passion, which is art and creativity and design. And that actually has been instrumental in a fabric that I've kind of carried throughout my career is designing things, looking at something and making it better. You know, here's a problem. How can I make that better? How can I literally design that into something that works and functions in a more practical way? And when was it that you kind of first thought, all right, malnutrition, this is maybe something that I could do something about?

I always wanted to do good work internationally in far off places. I was the kid with National Geographic, ripped out pages, stuck on my wall. I think I was eight or nine years old. And in class, they say, write down what you want to be when you grow up. My dream was at that point to be an air mailman in Africa delivering medicine to villages.

I think I was about eight or nine. And I literally had this image, this small Cessna where I just pop between villages to drop off whatever medicine required. And in a way, ironically, you know, what I do now is, you know, in villages, providing key, literally life-saving nutrients to the flour that people eat every day, and then going to another village and doing the same. And I don't have an airplane, but I have this machine that we built. So to answer your question a long way, whether I knew it or not at that time, I knew I wanted to help health as well. The more direct link to malnutrition came a little bit later in life

when I said yes to an invitation back in 2006 to visit Cambodia to help out a friend of my mother who was working with a group of street children. That's the first time I came face to face with malnutrition and cognitively recognized it as such. And children would come into our project and say they're 11, 12, and it looked like they were six, seven, eight. And so there was an obvious physical stunting and there was some cognitive developments and there was obviously weak immune systems and, you know, infections would take weeks to heal. And some children even passed away from, from malaria and things like that and diarrhea that you should not pass

away from if you had a strong immune system. So I started to educate myself, why was this happening? You know, why, why were these kids being exposed to all these things? I recognized very quickly that, you know, unless you have good nutrition in those first thousand days of a child's life, it's really hard to have a strong immune system to fight illness and disease. literally in those first thousand days of a child's life, get to mothers before they're mothers, right? Women of reproductive age, if they're healthy, they're having healthy children. Those children have a chance for a healthy life.

And again, through further research, I realized that nutrition projects, there's various forms of them, but food fortification, literally making food stronger by adding these key nutrients, vitamins and minerals, it's extremely cost effective and impactful way to scale a nutrition program. At the same time, something came across my desk as far as a job opportunity to work with this Stanford graduate school professor on a project that he had called Project Healthy Children to look into the prospects of bringing

better nutrition down to the village level. And for me, that was the dream job. Something clicked in me and I applied and I think I was the last man standing as far as willing to take the job. And the person said, guess what, you're hired. And it was at that point in time, the best day of my life. what you're hired. And it was at that point in time, the best day of my life. And I'll never forget it. And that man is David Dotson, who is my co-founder, my mentor, my friend. And we've been on this journey ever since. Wow. So we tend to confuse malnutrition with starvation. Can you explain the difference for us? That's a great question because there are differences.

If you think of a spectrum, on one end you have starvation, all the way on the other end you have obesity. Obesity is actually a form of malnutrition. It's over-nutrition. It's poor nutrition. Starvation, the lack of consuming enough food, means you also don't consume enough nutrients. And so that's another form of

malnutrition. But there's something in the middle and it's called hidden hunger. Hidden hunger is when maybe you do have enough food, but you don't have the right amounts of that food in the form of the right amounts of nutrients. And so your belly could be full, but you could literally be starving from the lack of nutrients and thus it's called hidden hunger. And the lack of nutrients could be iron that affects stunting. It could be folic acid that affects mental development and could lead to things like neural tube defects. It could be a lack of zinc that affects the respiratory system. So that middle area is the extreme because of the numbers. And yes, there are populations that are affected by starvation. And unfortunately, there's populations growing every day

affected by obesity in this country. We know it all too well. But that middle area of people affected by hidden hunger affects 2 billion people in the world. That's a huge number. I think we've just hit 8 billion people. So one in four people are affected by hidden hunger. And so the result of 2 billion people suffering from micronutrient malnutrition leads to 8,000

children dying every single day. 8,000 children under the age of five. That's heartbreaking. And that gets us out of bed as an organization to fight that every single day because because that's the urgency. We're not talking about next year, this bad thing will happen. We're talking about every single day that we wake up and go to bed. These statistics, unfortunately, don't stop until we really end malnutrition. So you've gone through this amazing journey. You've met your co-founder, David. You've identified what it is that you want to do and obviously gathered a number of skills along the way.

Can you talk us through the creation of this machine that you made? We hear you spent two years in Nepal designing it yourself. I would love to hear a little bit more about that. Yeah, this machine is really, again, core of what we do. It allows us to do the job. And a lot of our identity is wrapped up in this do. It allows us to do the job. And a lot of our identity is wrapped up in this machine. It's called a dosifier. And it's called a dosifier because it literally doses these key life-saving nutrients into the food that people eat every single day.

And so I got to give a lot of credit to my co-founder, David. There was a really rough prototype that was built by some engineering students at Stanford University. And they got it to the point, I guess, a proof of concept point where it didn't necessarily work, but it had potential to work if more resources and time was invested into it. And so, you know, at the time I was working, as I told you, essentially on the beaches of Cambodia, a kid with bright eyes and dreams and all him in Kathmandu and gave him some blueprints and says, go build a machine that's going to improve the lives of 100 million people. And although I don't have an engineering background, I do have a bit of design background. And I was the kid that took apart everything in the kitchen, all the appliances. Wasn't very good about putting them back together, but definitely I love to open up things, see how it works, the gears, the motors, and do some basic wiring.

And so I for two years until we got a machine to the point that we felt, okay, it's not blowing up anymore. It's not burning out. It's actually looking like it might work. And it was me and David in this kind of hilly area, the foothills of the Himalayas, about two or three hours outside Kathmandu where we were testing. And it was quite the hike to get to this what they call a hill station town. It was tiny, maybe 100 people in that village. We finally installed this machine, again, that we felt was the one that could finally work. And we turned it on.

It didn't blow up. And there's a feed screw that turns, that pushes out this powder nutrient. And it went into the mill that grinds up the grain. And out comes this flour. At this point, it's fortified. And tears are in my eyes and David's eyes that it finally, finally works. But then this whole kind of wave of new emotions like, oh man, what did we just create? Because then we felt this enormous responsibility that now we have this machine, now we have to reach millions of people.

And in honor of that chapter that just opened up and that realization, we named our organization Sanku. And Sanku is the name of that village that we're sitting in, eating that food, watching the machine that worked finally. And that journey up to that point and that journey since then has been an honor of that moment. Oh my goodness. I can't imagine what it would have felt like turning on that button for the first time and it working. It was amazing. Even right now, I've got chills and almost tears just It was amazing. Like I just, even right now,

I've got chills and almost tears just thinking about it. Like that feeling never ends because we've come so far from that first day. And there was lots of work and lots of years before that first day, but we pushed the button and it was almost like we pushed a domino. And since then, that one domino

has just continually just fanned out. And now we're reaching 6 million people every single day with fortified flower from that first moment, that first domino. And it's not going to stop until we hit 100 million people. So once you had designed the machine and it was working and you know that you have to get it out there, can you talk us through the process? Because you took that machine, you literally dragged it around East Africa to test it in local mills. What was that experience like? Amy, you're right.

I mean, one machine working was a great milestone, but then it was like, oh, wow. The next phase of this project was really to stress test the machine in different mills to make sure it's essentially a one size fits all. So we can just build one shape, one size, and it would be very replicable in all the countries that we work in. We'd moved from Nepal, which was kind of the testing ground, through an invitation from the government of Tanzania. They got wind of this one machine. Again, we built the machine because there wasn't anything off the shelf. And so once we built a machine, other people looking for a solution for what's called small scale or village scale food fortification, they

were very excited about the machine that we built for this purpose. And so the government of Tanzania said, come on down. And again, I jumped on a plane, one-way ticket, backpack, and this machine, which at the point was in a big box. And obviously to your listeners, they can't see, but think about one meter by one meter square box, cardboard box, quite heavy, 30 plus kilograms, but technically you'd be strapped to the back of a bicycle, but hard for one person to carry at that point. It was still in the early days of design. We hadn't made it lighter and more streamlined. So I show up to Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania. This now is fast forwarding

to 2012 with the idea of doing a bit of a loop, going from Tanzania to Kenya, Kenya to Mozambique, Mozambique to Malawi, and then back to Tanzania. And the idea was to hit all those countries that we knew and we hoped one day we'd work in and to install this machine in hundreds of mills to again, to stress test it, to make sure it's scalable. At that time, I didn't really plan very well. It's scalable. At that time, I didn't really plan very well. I was very optimistic, overly optimistic about how hard this trip would be by myself with a big box. And the first couple weeks went well and I got through Kenya.

Then I got into Mozambique. I remember putting the box on this train to go all the way to the border in Malawi. And it snaked around all night, this train to go all the way to the border in Malawi. And it snaked around all night, this train. I think it felt like three days. It probably was just a day. But this is going into week four. I'm pretty exhausted. And I didn't realize that the train drops you off about a couple of kilometers from the border. And I said, what now? It literally was this tiny little dusty town. I had to get to the border a couple of kilometers. I'm dragging this box and this guy rolls up next to me with a motorbike and he kind of takes me to the border with this big box. And I will always remember this. It was so heavy and we're going through sand and the back of the bike was just

kind of fishtailing. And I said, is this where I'm going to die? You know, crushed by my invention on the side of a dusty road in Mozambique. And anyways, I got through that point and I think I gave him a dollar for the ride. And then there was still a journey to get to the border with Malawi because there was this no man's land about the size of a football pitch in between two long fences, literally in between two countries, Mozambique and Malawi. So I'm dragging it halfway through this no man's land. And I just sit there and I take a break and it's hot. First of all, it's really, really hot. It feels like the desert. And, uh, you know, this is week four, I'm dehydrated. I'm, Irated. I'm starting mentally to break down

and I'm sitting on my box and I'm like, what the hell am I doing? You know, I've got one machine, I'm dragging it through East Africa with no plan, just kind of, well, I'll go here and then go there type thing. And I kind of felt like, well, is this as far as it goes? And then again, I'm thinking about what's in that box and thinking about my co-founder's voice, David, in my ear saying, this is going to improve the life of a hundred million people. And I kind of theoretically slapped myself saying, how dare I get tired? I've got this opportunity to reach hundreds of million people and i'm going to like give up in the middle of the sand here and so i just you know get up pick up the rope because at that time i had a rope wrapped around the the box and i drag it another whatever 20 30 meters into malawi do the passport control and put it on a on a on a truck and i think the truck was

was was transporting transporting bicycle parts. And I said, can I get a ride to the capital? And they said, come on. And I basically hitchhiked all the way to Lelongwe and did mills there and eventually back into Tanzania. And a couple of weeks later, I was shaking the hand of the president of Tanzania and him challenging me to put one of these machines

in every village in Tanzania. And since then, we have close to a,000 and again, reaching 6 million people. So thankfully, I didn't give up. And thankfully, the machine worked. And thankfully, I've got a great inspiring co-partner and the journey continues. Love hearing this story, Felix. And obviously, a journey of real ups and downs. I'm really curious about the actual technology. You've got this box, this machine. I imagine it's gone through a number of iterations since you dragged it through the sand.

The machine has to be pretty robust. You're taking it to very remote places, so communities where there's not always electricity and infrastructure. But at the same time, and the machine obviously is quite simple technology as well to be able to fit into a wide range of different mills. And yet at the same time,

you've also got it connected to the internet, which allows you to kind of have a dashboard and overview of all the machines. Can you talk to us about this really interesting combination of very basic and very advanced technology all in one package? Gus, I love the menu of things that you just said, because if somebody was to present that to me 10 years ago,

say, this is what you have to build. It's got to check all these boxes. I would have said, absolutely no, impossible. And we kind of went into it thinking, we're going to build this simple device. And so it was kind of one box and we're like, well, let's create another box to check and another box to check.

And so, yes, we've gotten up to the point in that list that you just, impressive list that you just read. But again, it started off very humble. We just wanted a little machine that basically dosed out nutrients and we'd attach that machine to existing mills. And just for the audience to paint the picture of what a small flour mill looks like in these communities in East Africa. First of all, these mills are the size of a small bedroom and a miller will buy grain, raw maize or corn. He'll put it into his milling machine, grind it up into flour, and then that flour is packaged and sold on the street to a mother or a customer. It's a very simple process. It's a very small mill, but these mills collectively feed entire nations, right? And so we thought, well,

we have to dose and add nutrients at that level, at that mill, because that's the food everybody eats. And so that's when we built this machine. The first prototype just kind of sat on the mill and dosed out a little nutrients. And then we're like, well, we got to make it bigger. We've got to automate it. We've got to put in a little control box to store that data. We've got to make it lower cost. So we've got to switch the plastic. We've got to, again, we can't drive around blindly to tens of thousands of mills. We've got to build in some scalability. And that's when we thought, well, let's add a SIM card that sends that data over the nearest cell tower to our dashboards, to our cell phones, so that we can monitor remotely. And so it was kind of a progression of, well, what's next? These boxes we have to check.

So in the simplest form, how it operates, again, it sits on an existing mill, a mill that a miller adds grain to. So we replaced that mill's hopper, meaning we are now the hopper for that mill. It's a weight-sensitive hopper. So when the miller adds his raw grain into our machine, that grain is weighed. For example, he adds a bucket of 20 kgs of grain. 20 kgs of grain is detected in our machine. As that grain flows out of our machine into the existing mill to be ground into flour, that loss of weight is detected as it goes down. And there's a pre-programmed dose

threshold in our machine that turns a feed screw, think of like an auger, that doses out a proportion amount of nutrients to the loss of weight of that grain. And it's very concentrated nutrients. nutrients to the loss of weight of that grain. And it's very concentrated nutrients. One kg of nutrients will fortify two metric tons of flour. And that nutrient premix that we're adding is essentially the daily multivitamins that we all take or should all take. If you crush that into powder, that's what it is. It's got iron, folic acid, B12, zinc, all the things that we take for granted every day. We're breaking that into a powdered form, automatically dosing that into flour. And it doesn't change the look, the color, the taste, the cookability. So now that flour has these key nutrients that we take for granted. Now they have that at the village level. And the machine, again, automates safely that into the flour and removes

all risk of human error. It's a one size fits-fits-all. It's literally five minutes out of the box, onto the mill strapped in, and no training necessary because it's automated. And that data is so critical that we can get that. I can show you right now, if we were screen sharing, you know, a tiny little mill in the corner of Kenya or Tanzania, exactly how much flour they're producing right now, how much nutrients are being added.

Is it within the standard? Is it correct? is it accurate? If the machine is overheating, where are the nearest cell towers? All these amazing things we're able to capture, automate the analytics of that and automate technicians to go out or to restock that mill with the nutrients that they need to ensure that that miller always has an accurate working tool to do the critical job of fortification. Felix, of all the food sources to choose, why flour? That's a great question because there are other food sources as far as staples that can be fortified. And the reason we chose flour is really because of the geographic location we're working. The staple food that's most consumed and in large amounts throughout these populations is maize flour. And the reason for that is that maize or corn

is grown everywhere. It's robust. It's a cash crop. Everywhere you go in East Africa, you see corn everywhere. It's in people's backyards. It's everywhere. So that's the most readily available food and it fills your stomach up. People are workers. They want to feel like their stomach is filled up with something substantial. Corn flour, and they cook it into a porridge. As a standalone, it's a carbohydrate. It gives you energy, but it doesn't give you nutritional content. It doesn't have the nutrients or enough of the intrinsic nutrients that we need to survive and thrive. So for us, it was the perfect vehicle. It's everywhere. Everybody eats it. When I say

everybody, like 95% of the population of 60 million people in Tanzania eats it. And the issue is it's all being produced at these small mills. It's not being produced at these large, industrially centralized food producers like you'd find here in Australia or General Mills in the United States. And so there was no fortification or improving of that flour because no technology or solution or business model existed. And that's really our path to scale, is minimizing the amount of behaviors we have to change, automating our technology, and not trying to introduce a new product. People are already eating this flour. We just come in and boop, we make it better

and nothing changes as far as one day to the next. The price doesn't change, the color doesn't change, the taste doesn't change, but people are now eating life-saving nutrients in that flour that they're consuming every single day. I wonder, Felix, if you could just share with us even just one story of the impact of this. I understand it Felix, if you could just share with us even just one story of kind of impact of this. I mean, I understand it in principle and in theory. I mean, you've got

a thousand machines out there. It's extraordinary. You're reaching six million people. But what does this actually mean for, let's just say, one community on the ground? What kind of changes have you heard about? The immediate impact of eating fortified staple foods is that mothers are going to recognize that their kids are getting sick less, right? Their immune system automatically is going to be stronger in the course of months and years to fight disease and sickness. And so, you know, they might get diarrhea, but they're not going to be affected by diarrhea as much, or they'll be able to combat diarrhea altogether. That's the immediate kind of anecdotal evidence. And so I've talked to mothers and they've said, thank you so much. My kids, I have to take them to the doctor less. And when you think about these communities, you know,

healthcare is not great and it could be expensive as well. And so, you know, the less your children are sick, the better, right? And especially for communities that are living under a dollar a day. And so malnutrition and combating malnutrition is a long game. The reduction of stunting, you're not going to see that from one month to the next or even one year to the next. It's really a generational thing. So we're in this for the long run. We know that we can have immediate positive impact by strengthening immune systems. But as I mentioned earlier, getting to mothers before their mothers, getting their immune

systems strong, they're going to give birth to stronger children. Those children in those first thousand days are going to have healthier food to build strong immune systems. They're going to have higher IQs. They're going to go to school and be able to concentrate better. They're going to be stronger. They're going to enter the workforce better. As a country, there's going to be less absenteeism. There's going to be less of a brain drain. There's going to be less of a stress on the health system. And just some high kind of macro numbers, in Tanzania, $400 million every year in GDP losses due to malnutrition-related stresses on the system and on the workforce. And so it's kind of compounded. So you can think kind of on the micro level what malnutrition

affects a family or a child and how fortified food and what we're doing improves that child on a daily basis. And then you can kind of fast forward and aggregate all of those children and over the course of a generation, how you can develop a nation literally through the stomach and through better food. It's quite inspiring how the ripple and those dominoes spread out over the generation. And in 10 years, how a country will change because from day one, their citizens have better health and really access to a basic human right we think everyone should have. So you have a pretty big goal for Sanku to hit by 2025. Can you tell us what it is and give us a bit of an update on how it's all progressing? Sure. We are currently working in Tanzania and Kenya.

We have close to a thousand millers dotted throughout these areas fortifying flour every day. And the flour produced every day is feeding roughly 6 million people. We actually reached that milestone yesterday, 6 million people. We were at 5.9 for a while, a couple weeks. And so that's pretty exciting. Amazing. Congratulations. Yeah.

Wow. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you so much. We're excited because we should be reaching our target of close to 7 million by the end of the year. And so definitely on path to reach our big targets

by 2025, 17 million. By 2030, 100 million. It's going to take a lot of work. It's going to take as well a lot of countries. So currently in Tanzania and Kenya, we're looking to expand next year, possibly Ethiopia. But there's countries like Uganda, Mozambique, Malawi, Rwanda, all of these countries are markets for us. And I say that that really is unfortunate. I don't say that it's exciting because we have this market. When I say market,

it means it's a community that has high malnutrition rates. So that's the sad part, but the exciting part is that we're coming with a solution to combat that. So reaching 100 million people, I feel will be a great milestone and will pause in 2030 and take a breather, but get right back to work because again, 2 billion people are suffering from this.

It's super exciting. It's such an amazing goal. We were so glad to find you and play a tiny little part in helping you achieve that. Can you tell people a little bit more about how to find out about the work Sanku is doing? Where do people go if they want to hear more and get involved? They can always reach us and find out what we're doing on our website, sanku.com.

We're very strongly partnered with Life You Can Save, inspired by Peter Singer's book here in Australia. It's an organization that you can donate to and get tax deductions, and that money would go directly to us, 100%. You can also donate through our website. And as a social enterprise, we want to become sustainable. And so every year as we grow,

we reduce our cost per person and our need for philanthropy or donations because we don't want to always be coming back to donors. So we really think like a business. And so the bigger we are, the lower our cost per person to deliver our service. And so right now, I think it's about 80 cents per year that Sanku can guarantee that somebody,

one single person in East Africa can consume fortified flour for the entire year for less than a dollar. So it's incredibly cost effective. These machines that we install feed on average 5,000 people every single day with fortified flour. And they last seven, eight years in the field. So we install it in a village for seven or eight years. It's feeding 5,000 people every single day. One of those machines costs $2,000. What I love about the work is it's tangible. You

can touch it. It's not policy. It's not academic. We put machines in villages and these villages produce fortified flour and these people eat it. It's that simple and you can touch every part of that. And so I'm very proud to speak to people about what we do and the authenticity of what we do and the cost effectiveness of it as well. Felix, we ask all our guests a final question, and it's always the same, and it's what does hope mean to you? Hope to me means that, and this is going back to my childhood, that everybody has equal access to the basic human rights that we all deserve. For me, I believe we can get there.

I've seen it firsthand of communities not having them and then communities having them within a matter of weeks. Hope for me is that that can be achieved. It's going to take a lot of work. It's going to take a lot of collaboration. But everyone accessing basic human rights, for me, that's a hopeful place to be. This is a show about the heroes who are rolling up their sleeves to do the work. The ones who are willing to do whatever it takes, dragging machines through the sand, across borders, and into the lives of hundreds of thousands of people to stitch the world back together.

They remind us that it's one thing to show up, but another to stay and then to keep showing up. If you'd like to find out more about Sanku and support their mission, you can go to their website, projecthealthychildren.org, and also check out our show notes for links to their social media. We are proud to have Sanku as one of our charity partners at Future Crunch and would like to thank our paying subscribers for making this possible. We donate a third of our subscription fees to under-the-radar charities that are helping people and the planet. If you're interested in becoming

a subscriber, you can find out more at futurecrunch.com. We would like to acknowledge that this podcast is recorded in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woiwurrung people. There are a lot of podcasts out there. It means a lot to us that you chose this one. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to support Hope as a Verb, please subscribe and leave a review. And if you want to reach out directly, send us an email at hope at futurecrunch.com.au. Thanks for listening.