Bioversity International receives Grand Challenges Explorations Funding

Press Release

Rome (GMT+1)        
6:00pm November 7, 2011

Bioversity International Receives Grand Challenges Explorations Funding. Pioneering approach to better nutrition for mothers and young children.

Rome, Italy

Bioversity International announced today that it will receive funding through Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative created by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that enables researchers worldwide to test unorthodox ideas that address persistent health and development challenges.

Bioversity International, in collaboration with Save the Children UK, will pursue an innovative global health research project, titled The Role of Wild and Underutilized Foods in Daily Costs of Diets in Baringo, Kenya.

Grand Challenges Explorations  [1] funds scientists and researchers worldwide to explore ideas that can break the mould in how we solve persistent global health and development challenges. The Bioversity International and Save the Children UK project is one of 110 Grand Challenges Explorations grants announced today.

“We believe in the power of innovation—that a single bold idea can pioneer solutions to our greatest health and development challenges,” said Chris Wilson, Director of Global Health Discovery for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “Grand Challenges Explorations seeks to identify and fund these new ideas wherever they come from, allowing scientists, innovators and entrepreneurs to pursue the kinds of creative ideas and novel approaches that could help to accelerate the end of polio, cure HIV infection or improve sanitation.” 

Projects that are receiving funding show promise in tackling priority global health issues where solutions do not yet exist. This includes finding effective methods to eliminate or control infectious diseases such as polio and HIV as well as discovering new sanitation technologies.

Bioversity will be working in close partnership with Save the Children UK to better understand the role and potential of wild and underutilised foods in improving the diets of children aged 6-24 months and mothers in the Baringo East Region of Kenya; a region with persistently high levels of chronic child malnutrition.

Save the Children UK has developed a Cost of Diet tool that calculates the minimum amount of money a household will have to spend to meet their full nutritional requirements using locally available foods (produced, bought or gathered).

“By better understanding which wild foods poor households do and could consume together with the nutrient composition of those foods, we will be able to model the impact these foods could have on the affordability of a nutritious diet using this tool” said Alex Rees of Save the Children UK.

 “A clearer understanding of the role of wild and underutilized foods in helping to deliver a nutritionally adequate diet – at the same time as reducing its cost -- will enable researchers and policy-makers to develop accessible and local food-based solutions to malnutrition in mothers and their young children,” said Federico Mattei of Bioversity, who will be carrying out the research with local partners.

 “We hope that this approach will provide evidence of the role of local foods in filling nutrient needs for poor communities. And although the specific local foods will differ from place to place, it should be possible for wild and underutilized foods to fill the cost gap of nutritious diets in many more places,” said Dr Jessica Fanzo of Bioversity.

ENDS
 

Notes to Editors:

About Grand Challenges Explorations

Grand Challenges Explorations is a US$100 million initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Launched in 2008, Grand Challenge Explorations grants have already been awarded to nearly 500 researchers from over 40 countries.

The grant program is open to anyone from any discipline and from any organization. The initiative uses an agile, accelerated grant-making process with short, two-page online applications and no preliminary data required. Initial grants of $100,000 are awarded two times a year. Successful projects have an opportunity to receive a follow-on grant of up to US$1 million.
 

About Bioversity International

Bioversity International is a world leading research-for-development non-profit organization, working towards a world in which smallholder farming communities in developing countries are thriving and sustainable. Bioversity’s purpose is to investigate the use and conservation of agricultural biodiversity in order to achieve better nutrition, improve smallholders’ livelihoods and enhance agricultural sustainability.

Bioversity is part of the CGIAR which works to reduce hunger, poverty and environmental degradation in developing countries by generating and sharing relevant agricultural knowledge, technologies and policies.

This research, focused on development, is conducted by a Consortium of 15 CGIAR centres working with hundreds of partners worldwide and supported by a multi-donor Fund.

For further information contact:

Jeremy Cherfas
j.cherfas@cgiar.org
+39 6118 234