Food Fortification

En français

HKI’s food fortification programs offer another solution to improve nutrition by enriching commonly-used food products with important vitamins and minerals. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies (VMDs) cause premature death, disability and reduced work capacity throughout the world. In industrialized countries, the fortification of staple foods is commonplace, but it has not been widely undertaken in other parts of the world.  Food fortification includes large-scale efforts in partnership with the private sector, such as HKI’s Fortify West Africa program, or point-of-use efforts at the consumer level, such as adding powdered preparations of vitamins and minerals to home-prepared complementary foods, and foodlets, which are highly fortified products that can be crumbled into or dissolve in traditional food.

Cooking Oil
Fortify West Africa is a partnership between public and private party stakeholders in eight francophone countries that addresses VMDs through food fortification. The first phase of the initiative has focused on fortifying cooking oil with vitamin A. HKI has worked closely with the Association of Oil Producing Industries of the Monetary and Economic Union of West Africa (known by its French acronym AIFO-UEMOA). The UMEOA covers Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo and the total population is estimated to be 85 million, of whom 15.6 are children under the age of five. The regional initiative intends to reach at least 70% of the population or 60 million people, 11 million of whom are under age 5, by the end of 2010.

After five years of advocacy and leadership in the region, HKI and the UEMOA Commission signed a Memorandum of Understanding in June, 2007. The agreement, which also included other international and regional partners, outlined and identified the steps needed to achieve mandatory vitamin A fortification of cooking oil in the participating countries. HKI has been a critical player in creating the regulatory framework and is developing social marketing strategies to maximize its success. HKI also provides technical assistance and capacity-building to each country’s oil factories to help them transition toward producing and distributing vitamin A-fortified oil. 

Cooking oil was chosen because it is a daily staple in the West African diet that is purchased and consumed in small quantities even among the poorest families. The oil companies HKI works with adhere to quality control standards and their refining processes eliminate gossypol (a compound which can be toxic and have negative health impacts) from their crude cottonseed oil.

Wheat Flour
HKI has harnessed the momentum of its vegetable oil fortification campaign to expand the fight against VMDs with a wheat flour fortification strategy. The fortification of cereal wheat flour, another market-penetrating staple food, with folic acid and iron will help combat birth defects and iron deficiency.  In November 2007, health ministers of 15 countries in ECOWAS, the West African regional organization for integrated economic development, passed a resolution for the fortification of cereal wheat flour.  Activities are now underway to adopt norms for micronutrient fortification of cereal flours in the UEMOA region with plans to enlarge the scope of fortification work to cover all ECOWAS countries.