Get Your Body Healthy

A determined band of social entrepreneurs has chosen an admirable challenge indeed.. attacking global malnutrition. 

Social entrepreneurs, according to Wikipedia, recognize a social problem and use entrepreneurial principles to create,organize, and manage a venture to achieve social change. 

They are people with innovative answers to society’s most urgent social problems.  Persistent and ambitious, they take on major social issues and provide new ideas for wide-scale change.

Global malnutrition is a huge social problem.  According to the UN World Food Programme 925 million people do not have enough to eat.  10.9 million children under five die in developing countries every year.  Malnutrition and hunger-related diseases cause 60 percent of those deaths.

Malnutrition is more than a measure of what we eat or fail to eat.  It is characterized by inadequate intake of protein, energy and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) and by frequent infections and diseases.  When people are starved of the right nutrition they may die from common infections like measles and diarrhea. 

Malnutrition therefore isn’t only an inadequate intake of food, but an inadequate intake of foods containing the required nutrition.  Lack of adequate micronutrients in the diet affects nearly two billion people worldwide.  The World Health Organization says that deficiencies of iron, vitamin A, and zinc are among the top ten leading causes of death through disease in developing countries.

A major challenge in combatting global hunger is how to fund and sustain programs which provide food relief.  Without sustained, consistent, and growing funding, relief efforts are at the mercy of shifting economic conditions and the good will of governments and governmental organizations.

Currently, the global economic situation has negatively affected giving to charities.  In the U.S.A. charitable giving fell by 3.2% in 2009, the largest percentage in five decades according to a study by the Giving USA Foundation.  That follows a drop in giving of 2.4% in 2008 during the first full year of the recession.  Nationally, the Salvation Army saw a more than 8 percent decline, and this could mean even bigger trouble for the people who depend on them.  There’s word that many nationally known charities are in trouble.

With a growing need for food relief and decreasing charitable donations, social entrepreneurship programs may provide the best solution. 

An excellent example of social entrepreneurship being used to fight global malnutrition is this one by a company called Mannatech.  In Mannatech’s “Give For Real” program, consumers not only fund the donation of nutritional products to the hungry by their own purchases, but receive products and income in return.  That’s a tremendous incentive to support a worthy cause.

For more about this “donation through consumption” program and Mannatechs nutritional products go here.

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Tags: change, children, diseases, entrepreneurial, entrepreneurs, global malnutrition, hunger, malnutrition, micronutrients, protein, social change, social entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurship, UN, UN World Food Programme, vitamins and minerals, Wikipedia