Thursday 25th November 6pm

How to reduce poverty and malnutrition in a sustainable way in Bangladesh?

Get a loan for a cow (£700 for a cow with calf):

Milk it daily:

Take your milk to a Grameen Danone collection point, where you get paid 25p per litre if it's of the right quality. (Most "farmers" get 15-20 litres from their cow each day so that's up to £5 per day of which their profit is around £2 after paying for animal feed, vet bills etc.).

Turn the milk into small, nutrient-enriched yoghurts (each yoghurt is 80% milk). The nutritional composition of the yoghurt has been put together with GAIN, a major global charity, and it includes 30% of a child's needs for iodine, vitamin A and...wait for it...yes, iron. The milk is also a good source of protein in which they are deficient, living as they do on a diet of rice and lentils. The factory looks big in this photo but is actually quite small - the production area itself is about the size of the Careline part of the office:

Ship it to distribution points - supply chain as it was meant to be:


(Iain - I asked if he had implemented S&OP or GPS but he hadn't heard of either).

Get ladies to collect the yoghurts and take it round their villages to sell on commission (they get 1.5p for each yoghurt they sell). Here is a boy with his mum's bag of yoghurts for the day:

And now here's the challenge. How to get people subsisting on £2 a day in the urban slums to fork out 8p (that's all one yoghurt costs and that includes VAT, milk costs, production costs, money for the ladies) for each of their children every day? Because that's the only way that the cow-owners and sales ladies get to keep their jobs and the only way that the children can avoid stunting and all the other results of nutritional deficiencies that you know about from Food Matters!

We've got 4 days left to figure that challenge out for the urban slums. Any ideas anyone? (I did suggest a Big Iron Count already...)