Making a Difference in Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone (West Africa) is the country with the worst child nutrition crisis and the very worst child survival statistics in the world. Thus the World of Children chose this area to focus their outreach efforts. The World of Children award served as the catalyst for initiating a new Project Peanut Butter program, which produces RUTF (Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food) peanut butter for the severely malnourished children in that area.

One aspect of the program was to develop an RUTF production capability at a small plant in Freetown, Sierra Leone. IFN and Ross Mixers teamed up to develop an innovative approach to manufacturing this highly nutritional peanut butter, significantly increasing production efficiency and reducing capital cost versus the approach used by Project Peanut Butter in Malawi. Ross helped specify new large scale equipment and donated pilot plant time while IFN developed and recommended a more cost effective process that also allowed for the use of multiple raw material sources. The small factory now produces 180 kg batches of RUTF in less than two hours, making it feasible to produce over 1 metric ton of RUTF in a single day, which is enough to save the lives of over 65 severely malnourished children.

IFN first became involved with Project Peanut Butter in early 2008 when Peter Salmon volunteered to donate his time to visit the PPB factory in Blantyre, Malawi and review the quality control and manufacturing processes for manufacturing Chiponde, which is PPB’s peanut butter based RUTF. What followed were several fascinating days spent in Blantyre with Dr. Mark Manary, the founder of Project Peanut Butter, followed by two days in the Malawi countryside at a rural clinic observing the work of the field workers who do the on-the-ground work of organizations such as World of Children.

Learn more about the Sierra Leone Peanut Butter Project.