There is a critical period, from conception to 24 months of age, when without adequate diversity of diet and range of nutrients, both mental and [...]]]> Globally almost 300 million, one-third of the developing world’s children, suffer from chronic malnutrition.  This is nothing short of a disgrace.  The devastating longer-term consequences are often not fully appreciated.

There is a critical period, from conception to 24 months of age, when without adequate diversity of diet and range of nutrients, both mental and physical development is severely impeded – and this damage is irreversible.

Without proper nutrition, a child is intellectually blunted, resulting in significantly decreased educational attainment – irrespective of what support may subsequently be provided. Furthermore, increased ill health, sub-optimal earning capacity and greatly reduced life expectancy all stunt economic growth of developing countries.

“It doesn’t have to be this way. We have a sustainable business model for treating malnutrition. Furthermore, Valid Nutrition, the Irish-based company I founded in 2005, has a proven track record in this area. It is also the only company in the world exclusively manufacturing and marketing a range of ready-to-use therapeutic foods in Africa”, says Dr Steve Collins, who has received numerous awards for his work, including the 2010 global Ashoka Senior Fellowship award for social entrepreneurship and an MBE from Queen Elizabeth for his services to humanitarianism.

A medical doctor with a PhD in nutrition, he is a world-renowned expert on malnutrition, and publishes widely in major international medical journals such as Nature Medicine, The Lancet and The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

“For the first time in the history of human civilisation, the world now has the capability to combat malnutrition at real scale and help the children of the poorest nations realise their full potential. The development of highly fortified nutritious pastes, commonly referred to as ready-to-use therapeutic foods, together with community-based therapeutic care, a new approach to delivering nutritional care to people in their villages rather than in hospitals, have revolutionised our ability to treat severe malnutrition”, Dr Collins notes.

Dr Steve Collins on Newstalk – July 1st 2010

These innovative ready-to-use foods contain a mix of proteins, fats, carbohydrates and 40 different nutrients. They do not require mixing with water or any other liquid and can be eaten directly from the sachet pack. Because bacteria cannot grow in the packs, they can be stored safely for over 12 months without the need for refrigeration. As well as being highly convenient, children find them delicious. Those who are treated with the foods make a complete recovery within six weeks and do not relapse.

“By providing ready-to-use foods to mothers in their local communities rather than in conventional hospitals or health centres, which are often located far from villages, we have seen a dramatic improvement in treatment and prevention. Death rates have been cut by a factor of five and the lives of hundreds of thousands of children have been saved”, adds Dr Collins who first pioneered the concept of community-based therapeutic care (CTC) in the late 1990s.

Since then, his approach has been endorsed by the UN, adopted by the World Health Organisation, the World Food Programme and UNICEF, and is their preferred model for the treatment of severe malnutrition in children.

Valid Nutrition has operations in Malawi, Kenya and Zambia.  These operations will produce some 2 million life-saving sachets in 2010, and production is expected to grow by some 30% a year thereafter.

Last year, in Malawi alone, 50,000 children were treated with Valid Nutrition’s ready-to-use foods, and with new manufacturing operations coming on stream in Ethiopia and West Africa, some 200,000 children will be treated with these foods by end 2010.

As well as being hailed as a humanitarian success story, the Valid Nutrition business model has a number of interesting aspects.

First, although it is a social enterprise, it is run as a fully fledged commercial foods business, with the same governance and financial controls in place. The fact that it has no shareholders – allied to its status as a registered charity with related tax advantages – means that it can re-invest all of its profits in furthering its humanitarian aims.

Second, where possible, it sources ingredients for its products locally from small-holder farmers and local suppliers, thus bringing major advantages in terms of cost, quality and a multiplier effect to local economies – a sustainable approach in the broadest sense.

In keeping with Valid Nutrition’s humanitarian ethos, this local production approach to the treatment and prevention of malnutrition enables the company to help its customers avoid the high cost of raw materials, labour, transport and duties associated with importing this food from developed countries.

“With our manufacturing coming to scale, we are reaching a point where we can set a benchmark for price and quality which other companies in the ready-to-use foods market must meet. This will allow us to punch above our weight and use our presence in this market to leverage a much wider ethical engagement in under nutrition from other commercial players,” says Dr Collins.

In order to help Valid Nutrition reach that critical stage in its development, the company is seeking investors to offer interest-free loans, or donations of cash or services.  The loans will be repaid after 3 years, so the net donation to Valid Nutrition is the interest that might otherwise have been earned on the money.

Complete details are available here.

That’s about five thousand euro each for every man, woman and child.  Where has it gone?

It must have gone [...]]]> Something is rotten in the state of Ireland.  Here is the CEO of Anglo telling us that the money we have put into that bank will never be seen again. Twenty-two billion euro. Gone.

That’s about five thousand euro each for every man, woman and child.  Where has it gone?

It must have gone somewhere, right?  If it’s gone out of our pockets it must have gone into someone else’s pockets.

Never, never put the party of Ahern, Haughey and Cowen in power.  This loss is the effect of their policies.  Their cosy arrangments, non-existent financial regulation, and the fact that they live on a cloud of comfort away from the rest of us.

It angers me that they let this situation develop on their watch, whilst ignoring calls from people to do something about the property bubble.

You can do something about it. Apathy is an illusion. Granted, it’s a comfortable illusion to feel that there’s nothing you can do, but frankly it’s going to be an expensive one if all of us choose it. Choose to do something!

Visit the website of each political party. Read what they say they will do to fix this mess. Then pick a party and get involved.  Turn up to a meeting. Get out and campaign. That means talking to people that aren’t interested in politics and trying to get them interested!  Showing them how this really, really matters.

Let’s get a government that’s working for us, instead of plunging us deeper and deeper into debt trying to save their own skins.

One project arranged involves coming up with the cheapest way to distribute two hundred thousand free sample packets of the new Trebor [...]]]> For one reason or another,  I often get the opportunity to help people solve their business problems, so I’m formalising this and registering as a sole trader and declaring myself open for business!

One project arranged involves coming up with the cheapest way to distribute two hundred thousand free sample packets of the new Trebor chewing gum, another project is to solve some annoying problems that a small business is having with their emails/information systems and yet another project is to promote a charity which operates like a business, and is completely non-profit.  I’m looking forward to fitting all this in around my full-time job, and open to talking about jobs that might need doing in April/May.

So – if anyone has a problem that I could fix, get in touch and we’ll have a chat about it. Send-me-a-note and I’ll get back to you.  No charge unless something’s agreed!

One of the largest property owners in Dail Eireann, Frank Fahey TD, is blaming a ‘clerical error’ for his failure to mention to the Dáil the 50% stake he owns in Sage Construction Ltd. Furthermore, the company owes his wife over €950,000 according to the most [...]]]> Clerical error leads to TD forgetting about €1m investment

One of the largest property owners in Dail Eireann, Frank Fahey TD, is blaming a ‘clerical error’ for his failure to mention to the Dáil the 50% stake he owns in Sage Construction Ltd. Furthermore, the company owes his wife over €950,000 according to the most recent accounts filed. Neither were declared in the Register of Members interests in 2008 or 2009 and the Clerk of Dail Eireann, Kieran Coughlan, is considering complaints from members of the public alleging that these omissions are breaches of the 1995 Ethics in Public Office Act.

Deputy Fahey has had a history of controversial stories, such as the compensation scheme his department administered where two of his constituents received 75% of the total amount disbursed and one of his last actions as Minister whereby he granted the controversial foreshore license for Shell in Mayo, following in the footsteps of Ray Burke in accommodating the wishes of the oil company.

In response to this latest allegation, the Mail on Sunday reports that Deputy Fahey rushed to have the Register of Interests amended and issued a statement that the whole affair was due to a clerical error. Time will tell if this mistake will be excused or punished.

What’s most frustrating about this episode for me is that his constituents are unlikely to be overly perturbed by this, in the same way that they have not been bothered by other Fahey scandals.  I suspect that is so because in this nod and wink politics culture to which Fahey belongs, you actually want the guy to be doing favours for you and as such if he’s doing favours for other people, well that’s just part of politics and you have to accept it because you want the same thing done for you.

And there are probably enough people in his constituency grateful to Deputy Fahey to ensure that he is returned time and time again.

If you want to do something about this – you are free to complain to the Clerk of Dail Eireann (Kieran.Coughlan [at]  oireachtas.ie) that Faheys ommission may be a breach of Section 5 of the 1995 Ethics act.

2009 accounts for Sage Construction Ltd – http://www.scribd.com/doc/28788896/Frank-Fahey-Sage-Construction-Accounts

A long webpage with many other details about Deputy Fahey – http://www.soldiersofdestiny.org/tdpropertyportfolio.htm

Well, here I go. There’s an old laptop of mine which has been giving more [...]]]> I’ve heard a lot about Linux over the years, how it’s a ‘better’ operating system than Windows, how it’s going to break the domination of Windows (and how that’s a good thing) and mainly how awkward it is to use.

Well, here I go. There’s an old laptop of mine which has been giving more and more trouble recently with Windows, slow, infected, slow… annoying. Having invested too much time in trying to fix it, I’m off – I’m going to linuxland.

My research tells me that the only thing that I can’t do in linuxland is to use iTunes, which only really matters for my iphone. But, I’m not that attached to the iphone and my contract is up. Other than that, apparently Linux can do all by browsing, office work, music, video, and other bits and pieces in relative comfort.

The first thing that I had to do was to make a CD to install from (luckily I’d already had advice about which Linux to install) and there are nice and easy instructions for that. It took about 10 minutes to burn, I stuck it in the laptop, rebooted and a whole new desktop came up with one button ‘install ubuntu’. Nice start.

Clicked that and there were a few simple questions… now it’s installing. What will it be like?

(11 minutes later) Holy shit. I’m now editing this on my shiny new Ubuntu computer. It’s installed, it’s online and it’s about 10 times easier than windows.

Next challenge – sort out a photo organiser, music player, and office suite. So far it gets a huge thumbs up from me.

Any older relatives that might be wanting to start off on computers and will be starting from scratch… get them going on laptops with Ubuntu instead of Windows.

I met my first hiccup a minute later – went to Applications, Software Centre (instead of downloading installers like in Windows, you pick from a menu in the software centre)… and when I tried to select ‘Adobe Flash Player’ to install it, I saw an odd error. Luckily enough, a quick google solved it for me, and now it appears, the solution is updating my entire Ubuntu, so hurrah for that.

Onwards and upwards…

UPDATE:  March 22nd 2010

So far, it’s been incredibly reliable and almost everything has been working well.  There were two annoying problems and only one of them is partially solved. Flash wouldn’t work properly (since partially solved) and I can’t get the mic to work (so no Skype).

Other than that, it’s all good!

“This video follows the story of Skuzzi Port (the brown furry creature) in space as he faces the perils of a modern galaxy and the vanity of a distant robotic god”

Volunteering is not a waste of time, as long as you choose a high-quality organisation (which I would define as a signatory of the Comhlamh Volunteer Charter). As well as the short term benefits to the community overseas, and [...]]]> (at the outset I should say that I work for an NGO that sends volunteers overseas)

Volunteering is not a waste of time, as long as you choose a high-quality organisation (which I would define as a signatory of the Comhlamh Volunteer Charter). As well as the short term benefits to the community overseas, and the volunteer, the long term benefits are the real story here.

Some criticisms you might hear are that the volunteer is only doing something to make themselves feel better, or that if they really cared so much they would just give the money they had fundraised directly to the community overseas.

Of course the volunteer will feel better about doing some good, this is an important aspect and not to be ignored. But their help is very much appreciated by the communities overseas. For example, here’s a quote from Shubhra Chaterjee, CEO of Vikramshila Education Resource Society, Kolkata, an Indian organisation that receives Irish volunteers each summer:

“The volunteers add more, more and more, to the project; in terms of ideas, in terms of just their presence as role models in these various schools”

Vikramshila receive volunteers that are well prepared, that are available to volunteer full time for 10 weeks and will work as an effective team to solve the problems identified by the teaching staff.  The key aspect in making a difference in the overseas community is ensuring that the volunteers are suitably trained, and that the main beneficiary is the community in which the volunteer is going, and not just the volunteer.  To have that type of volunteering experience, you really have to find the right organisation, and not just go with the one that you see advertised everywhere.  If they are heavily promoted, the odds are that they are running it as a profit-making service, which you need to be aware of.

What of the notion that the fundraised money would do more good if it were just donated to the community overseas? On the surface, this makes a lot of sense, but it is an extremely short-term view. I can only explain how our organisation, Suas Educational Development, operates, but in our case we realise that the solution to the education problem is not just financial.

There are upwards of 70 million school-age children that don’t go to primary school and it will never be possibly to fundraise enough to put them all into school. The problem is far more complex.

There are social and economic reasons why children aren’t in school and, in general, people that volunteer overseas get a deeper understanding of those issues, and are more passionate to do something about it, than people that don’t have the same experience.

After their time as a volunteer, they can get involved in local or international politics, they can talk with their friends and families about the problems (and the solutions) and they will understand that while donations of funds are crucial at the moment, that is not the long term solution.

That is the reason why volunteering is about more than ‘the summer overseas’, because it gives people an experience of a situation that they cannot get any other way. It’s not the only route to understanding, but it is certainly a summer well spent.

To learn more about the organisation that I work for, and to apply (before December 21st) for next summers Volunteer Progamme, visit suas.ie

Credits: Poi by Jellybeano2008 Music by Aidan McCarthy and Conan from Skuzzi Port. Edited by Aidan McCarthy.

Afterwards, there were a few drinks and a bit of a waffle to be had, and at one stage people were asking Pat to be in a photo with [...]]]> So, the other night, Chelle n I went to RTE studios to be in the audience for Frontline – that current affairs that Pat Kenny hosts.

Afterwards, there were a few drinks and a bit of a waffle to be had, and at one stage people were asking Pat to be in a photo with them.  I had this brainwave that it would be fun to ask Pat to do a presentation shot to go in the collection that Chelle has.

(background – a presentation shot generally has some of Chelle’s friends doing a handshake and a presentation, with a randomer walking through the background of the shot… have a look at the facebook page)