Vodafone’s IoT connects with Sanku-Project Healthy Children:Aims to provide fortified flour to billions of poeple in African countries for 4 years.
A good move taken by Vodafone(U.K.-based telecom company) to fight against malnutrition in African countries.
Vodafone is working with Sanku-Project Healthy Children to integrate small flour mills in Africa with its Internet of Things (IoT) services. This will help in real-time monitoring of mills and data-driven insights to 3,000 small scale flour mills in Africa over the next four years.
Around the world, nearly 2 billions of people are affected due to Malnutrition. This occurs due to deficiency of nutrients in food causing various diseases and defects in childbirth, poor development and other micronutrient imbalance in child.
The Dosifier
Sanku-PHC is a small-scale fortification program that aims to reduce micronutrient malnutrition. With the help of Vodafone’s global IoT SIM and USB Connect technology, Sanku has build up a new technology named as “dosifier” which helps small-scale flour mills in rural areas of African countries to fortify flours with essential nutrients during the process of milling.
This will not only improve its efficiency but significantly make its program sustainable and cost-effective.
According to Sanku, one worker was only able to monitor 25 mills which was able to feed only 125,000 people with fortified flour. But with vodafone’s IoT SIM, now the same worker is able to monitor 100 mills and this increased the data of providing fortified flour to around 500,000 people.
With the “dosifier”, the Sanku worker now gets the real-time monitoring and receives alerts remotely whenever the mills runs out of fortified flour or need any maintenance.
“Our dosifier has been incredibly successful to date, bringing fortified flour to communities in need across the developing world,” said Sanku-PHC Co-founding President and CEO Felix Brooks-church. “Vodafone’s IoT technology gives us the ability to significantly optimise and scale operations. Sanku-PHC currently helps provide fortified flour to around one million people and, with this new IoT connection, we are on a path to reach 100 million people by 2025. ”
This connection between Sanku and Vodafone’s IoT technology has resulted in:
• With the connectivity of Vodafone’s IoT SIM, the Sanku-PHC dosifiers have now become more sustainable, reliable and secure. Most of the remote areas now can be reached through Vodafone’s in-country roaming enabling to access real-time information about fortify flour, maintenance, power supply and machine tracking via GPS.
• The accurate monitoring improves the efficiency and scale of the fortification. So that more and more peoples and communities could get the benefits of the fortified flour.
• For secure transactions, Sanku-PHC is using Vodafone’s M-Pesa mobile money service. This enable the small-scale millers to make payments easily on their smartphone without any hassle. This improves the scale and reliability.
Currently, the Vodafone’s global IoT SIM and USB Connect technology and Sanku-PHC to provide fortified flour is rolling out in Tanzania and Rwanda. But is continually working to implement this technology across Eastern and Southern Africa.
Providing fortified flour to millions of people in African countries was made possible only because of IoT technology. This helped people especially childrens to fight against micronutrient malnutrition. As IoT is being experimented, tested and implemented, more such organizations and people will be benefited.
We at IoTBoys appreciate such steps and bring this very positive news to you.
Stay connected with us for more such updates and implementations on IoT.