Peanuts like these go into a nutritional peanut paste that is helping to save kids in Haiti. Photo: nojhan

This story was republished by The Christian Science Monitor.

A special kind of peanut butter has been bringing malnourished children back to life for years. Pharmaceutical company Abbott Labs is hoping it will help revive the Haitian economy, too.

International healthcare organization Partners in Health (PiH) has distributed Nourimanba, a ready-to-use nutritional paste, to combat malnutrition in Haiti since 2007, when another NGO, Meds & Food for Kids, helped them to get off the ground. Demand has only increased following the 2010 earthquake there, according to The New York Times.

As many as 300,000 children suffer from malnutrition in Haiti, says UNICEF. For these kids, Nourimanba is a lifesaver. Made from peanuts, milk powder, vegetable oil, sugar, and a scientifically-formulated mix of vitamins, it’s like a souped-up version of common child favorite peanut butter. This helps to explain why it’s been successful: it actually tastes good. There are other advantages, too: the main ingredients are all found in Haiti, where peanuts are grown as a crop, so it can be produced cheaply and locally. It’s also easy enough to use that parents can give it to their own children at home, rather than taking them to a hospital.

Nourimanba production in Haiti was feeding malnourished children before Abbott arrived on the scene, but somewhat small-scale and slow-moving. Abbott Labs took a look at what PiH was doing and saw an opportunity to turbocharge it. Abbott is donating 6.5 million dollars to help PiH and local Haitians scale up and improve their production of Nourimanba. This means building a new, three-million-dollar plant in Corporant, Haiti, that is projected to quintuple production. The old plant could produce about 70 tons of Nourimanba to feed 10,000 children a year; the new one should be pushing out 350 tons and will reach 50,000 kids, writes The New York Times.

Abbott isn’t just boosting quantity - they’re also using their expertise to help PiH improve the quality of Nourimanba. The new factory will mechanize the removal of bad peanuts, and safety and sanitation standards will be much higher, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Abbott also wants to tweak the formula to find a local replacement for milk powder, which currently must be imported.

“Local" is a key part of Abbott and PiH’s mission. They don’t just want to make Nourimanba better - they want to make it a sustainable business. Local products and employment should help ensure that Nourimanba benefits Haitians of all ages for years to come. There’s room for expansion, too: Abbott says the factory could make extra money in the future by producing normal peanut butter for consumer purchase.

The collaboration between Abbott and PiH is unique in the world of corporate-nonprofit partnerships. “This is a departure," PiH’s associate coordinator for nutrition in Haiti, Joan VanWassenhove, told the Times. "It’s not Abbott coming in and saying we have an idea we can do. It’s more like saying we want to take your vision and make it the best possible.”

The corporate-nonprofit partnership pays off for both parties. “This is an investment rather than charity,” Kathy Pickus, vice president of global citizenship and policy for Abbott, told the Stanford Social Innovation Review. “We wanted to work in the country to spark the economy.”

Last year's devastating quake in Haiti created a pressing need for new, durable housing structures. Photo: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps.

Part of a Global Envision miniseries about Portland State University's effort to become the "Consumer Reports" of developing-world technology. Read the introduction.

With the specter of Haiti’s hurricane season looming, everyone involved in the 1000 Homes for Haiti project wanted to get the sustainable, earthquake-proof shelters to the island nation as soon as possible.

But there was a catch: when the houses got wet, they leaked.

The story begins with Charles Fox of Portland’s Pacific Green Innovations (PGI), who came up with the idea for the project after a trip to Haiti in 2010, when he recognized the country’s need for low-cost, sustainable and permanent housing, according to the Portland Tribune. “If you give someone a transitional house, it becomes permanent,” he told the paper. As of August, more than 600,000 Haitians were still living in makeshift housing and tent camps, according to The Christian Science Monitor.

PGI bought building panels of resin-soaked recycled paper from a German building-material manufacturer called SwissCell, which PGI's website bills as earthquake-resistant, fire resistant, weather and temperature resistant.

In June 2010, PSU students actually assembled one of PGI's model homes in a campus park. This was partially to demonstrate another of the homes’ aspects that made it seem perfect for Haiti and the developing world in general: the building panels are modular and can be assembled quickly and simply. PGI says all of the houses’ materials can be produced in Haiti by Haitians.

Things went swimmingly until a curious detail caught the eye of a PSU researcher: the home had water damage. If sitting outside in Portland made the house leak, how would it hold up amid Haitian squalls, humidity and hurricanes? To test it, they tossed some of the panels into PSU’s state-of-the-art Thermotron, a device that, according to Senior Fellow Sergio Palleroni of PSU’s Institute for Sustainable Solutions, "can create any environment on earth, any weather condition." They cranked up the heat and humidity to Haitian summertime levels, and let the panels stew for a couple of weeks.

The results confirmed their initial suspicions: Palleroni says that on average, the material lost 60 percent of its structural capacity to resist breakage. In high-wind, high-humidity conditions, the houses could actually fall apart. And for a Caribbean country far more prone to hurricanes than earthquakes—there were four in 2008 alone, according to The Guardian—that’s a big problem.

PGI stands by their product despite Palleroni's criticism. PGI’s manufacturer, Magnum Building Products, wrote in an email to Global Envision that PSU's testing may not have been reliable.

"When installed properly and finished per the guidelines also found on our website, Magnum Board structures will be in use far longer than most any other building product on the market today,” wrote Daniel Armstrong. His full response can be found below, in the comments section.

PSU researchers don’t say the houses have no use, but they don’t think they are a good permanent solution for Haiti. Palleroni pointed out that while the building materials may have passed the manufacturer’s test, they were tested as separate components; the problems showed up when they were fully assembled. PGI disagrees, with its manufacturer arguing that PSU made “no distinction as to what elements of the assembly were the primary contributor(s)" to the homes' failure.” PGI has already implemented their housing program in Haiti.

While there’s no consensus over the houses’ suitability for Haiti’s climate, the fact that there’s a debate at all is unusual. Intensive testing like the kind done at PSU is not often performed on products for the developing world. All too often, potential design problems aren’t identified until after a product is in use. Sending flawed products abroad wastes money and other resources, and in some cases the products might even hurt those that they are intended to help. Improved technologies and testing procedures allow for a longer revision period and result in better products that do more for people in need. And since that’s really the goal of humanitarian design, hopefully intensive product testing will become the norm.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.

Cellphones are transforming the way in which aid workers are tackling the transmission of infectious diseases in Haiti. Photo:ambafranceht (flickr)

In Haiti, aid workers may have saved thousands of lives by tracking the cell phones of displaced citizens.

Following the 2010 earthquake (which claimed the lives of over 200,000), and a deadly cholera outbreak that originated in a U.N refugee camp, public health researchers in the area discovered that they could harness Haiti’s burgeoning cell phone network in a unique way.

Researchers found that not only was it possible to anonymously track (via cellphone SIM cards) the movements of displaced citizens, but that in doing so they could also anticipate the spread of epidemics, NPR reports. This let aid and health workers reach areas of infection more efficiently, curbing the further spread and transmission of disease.

An additional benefit to utilizing the Haitian cell network was that medical workers were able to distribute health advice by way of text and voicemail messages to thousands of Haitians, tips on everything from re-hydration to breastfeeding infected babies.

Though this effort was one of the first of its kind, infectious disease investigators believe that similar techniques for future outbreaks around the globe have the potential to be equally effective. Add "epidemic control" to the consistently growing list of uses for mobile phones. At the pace that cellular and smart phone technology are developing, who knows what’s next?