How one woman is rethinking how hungry children are fed around the world

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• John Yang:

  Armed conflicts and climate change are fueling a global hunger crisis. Tens of millions of children under the age of five are malnourished. Pamela Watts of Rhode Island PBS Weekly introduces us to a woman on a mission to change that.

• Navyn Salem, Founder, Edesia, Inc.:

  Our most basic need in life is food and nutrition. So without that, we really aren`t setting children up for their best chance that they would have in life.

• Pamela Watts (voice-over):

  Giving a child a chance in life serves as the compass for Navyn Salem. She`s on a quest to end malnutrition for children around the globe under the age of five. Her company, Edesia, named after the Roman goddess of food, manufactures these squeezed packets of a fortified peanut butter called Plumpy Nut.

  The nutrient enriched paste doesn`t need water or refrigeration and is easy for kids to feed themselves. It has been proven to take a child from the brink of starvation to salvation in just six to eight weeks. Salem has traveled the world witnessing the results of Plumpy Nut firsthand.

• Navyn Salem:

  They have to eat one packet in the clinic in order just to prove that they can eat it and they don`t have complications. These children don`t look anything like the ones that you just saw in the severe acute malnutrition space. They are already being interactive. They`re laughing, they`re playing with you.

• Pamela Watts:

  What`s the magic? It`s fortified. It has nutrients and calories.

• Navyn Salem:

  And tastes good. I mean, even if you`re a very hungry child, the food needs to taste good because children, no matter where they are, they can all be picky.

• Pamela Watts (voice-over):

  Salem says volunteering for a clinic like this one in Chad is where her nutrition mission was born.

• Navyn Salem:

  The first time that I saw a two-year-old that looked like my newborn at home, I realized that this is an incredibly urgent situation that is something that I could never unsee or forget about. It stayed with me all the time.

• Pamela Watts (voice-over):

  The United Nations Children`s Fund found that 155 million children under age 5 are malnourished. And the World Health Organization estimates that almost half of the deaths of children in that same age group are linked to malnutrition. It`s a crisis Salem says is being fueled by two things.

• Navyn Salem:

  Climate change is causing droughts, years long droughts and floods that are catastrophic. They`re biblical, right? Like we`ve never seen before. So this is forcing huge amounts of people to migrate.

• Pamela Watts:

  Andrew Kamara, vice president of operations at Edesia, was once one of those affected by conflict. His family had to flee Sierra Leone during its long civil war.

  Andrew Kamara, VP of Operations, Edesia Inc.: My two sisters and I ended up in Guinea, West Africa, as refugees. So we had to learn how to survive, how to stay resilient, how to fight to really make it another day. I think that experience prepared me for the work that I`m doing today. I felt like during my many years of living in a refugee setting and seeing suffering, human suffering, hunger and starvation and malnutrition and all kinds of difficulties.

• Pamela Watts (voice-over):

  And Kamara is not the only one working here who has lived that experience.

• Andrew Kamara:

  Many, many of my colleagues have been through the same path as me. They`ve lived in refugee camps. They were once hopeless, and today they`re in a position of giving back to those same refugee camps. They take that job very seriously. A life is saved for every time you produce a box.

• Pamela Watts (voice-over):

  Kamara sees each package as a box of hope. The plumping nut inside provides meals for two months, enough to rescue a severely malnourished child.

• Andrew Kamara:

  These could be your children. These are the world`s children. And we all have to be part of the fight to give them a life that is full.

• Pamela Watts (voice-over):

  Salem is now developing a product for pregnant women. She says it`s not about treating malnutrition. Prevention is the priority.

• Navyn Salem:

  We don`t have the luxury of saying, this isn`t working so well today because, yes, we`re going to get interrupted everywhere on a government level, a policy, a war zone that a truck`s trying to get through, pirates in Somalia, you name it, we`ve had it. Right? But how do you get around that? And how do you make sure? Because every minute counts.

• Pamela Watts (voice-over):

  For PBS News Weekend, I`m Pamela Watts in North Kingstown, Rhode Island.

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