 Fortify Health and Feeding India are delighted to announce a partnership to advance their shared vision of a healthier, better-nourished India. Feeding India by Zomato is an established not-for-profit organisation designing interventions to reduce hunger among underserved communities in India. Fortify Health is also a not-for-profit organisation, with a mission to enable access to micronutrient-rich wheat flour to reduce and prevent iron-deficiency anaemia. The partnership will bring together Fortify Health's unique experience in supporting and monitoring chakki atta fortification in various Indian states with Feeding India’s extensive networks with on-ground non-profit partners working in education. Under the partnership, Fortify Health and Feeding India will work closely to encourage and support Feeding India’s partner organisation to distribute fortified chakki atta. Feeding India will assist its partners to procure and provide fortified chakki atta to the vulnerable communities they serve. Fortify Health will engage with partners to explain the benefits of fortification and also support them in monitoring the quality of the chakki atta they provide. Vishal Kumar, Head of Feeding India, said: "With real-world evidence highlighting the transformative impact of fortification, this collaboration between Feeding India and Fortify Health represents a significant step forward in our mission. Together, we aspire to not only raise awareness about food fortification but also ignite actionable change through our volunteer network of Poshan Champions and our partner organisations in the Daily Feeding Program." Tony Senanayake, Chief Strategy Officer at Fortify Health, said: “Feeding India is a Pan-Indian, household organisation that is doing great work to bring nourishment to underserved populations. Fortify Health looks forward to supporting Feeding India on their journey and to bringing greater recognition to the highly cost-effective, evidence-based solution of wheat flour fortification.”  The Feeding India and Fortify Health teams meeting in Gurgaon to sign the partnership Memorandum of Understanding. About Feeding India:
Feeding India, powered by Zomato, is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to eradicating hunger and improving malnutrition rates in India. They work toward this mission by supporting large-scale systemic interventions as well as providing essential food support to underserved communities in the form of raw grains and freshly cooked food. For more information, please visit https://www.feedingindia.org/ About Fortify Health: Fortify Health is a not-for-profit organisation that works to enable access to micronutrient-rich chakki atta to reduce and prevent iron-deficiency anaemia. Fortify Health does this through three key workstreams:
For more information about Fortify Health’s work, please visit https://www.fortifyhealth.global/who-we-are.html/
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 Fortify Health is thrilled to announce that it has established a partnership with the Food Fortification Initiative (FFI) to support wheat flour fortification in India. FFI is an internationally-recognised organisation that works with governments and other partners to support the fortification of wheat flour, maize flour and rice across the world. Under the partnership, Fortify Health and FFI will work together to support government social safety net programmes to provide micronutrient-rich wheat flour to vulnerable communities in various Indian states.
The partnership will take advantage of each organisation’s unique experience and resources to support FFI and Fortify Health’s shared vision for a healthier world. It will draw upon FFI’s deep experience of working with governments and implementing agencies while leveraging Fortify Health’s strong ‘on the ground’ presence and existing relationships with millers across India. Fortify Health and FFI will work closely to assist government partners to implement fortification in their social safety net programmes. Mr Scott Montgomery, Director of Food Fortification Initiative mentioned: “More than half of all women and children in India suffer from micronutrient deficiencies that have immediate and long-term effects on their health. And yet we have a highly effective, proven intervention that has reduced micronutrient deficiencies in countries across the world, including India, over the past 100 years: food fortification. We look forward to partnering with Fortify Health and our public, private, and civic partners in India to develop fortification programs that build stronger futures.” Tony Senanayake, Chief Strategy Officer at Fortify Health, mentioned: “Chakki atta fortification is a cost-effective, evidence-backed intervention that can help reduce and prevent iron-deficiency anaemia. Fortify Health is excited to partner with FFI to scale chakki atta fortification to those who are most susceptible to the insidious challenges of anaemia through social safety net program partnerships with the government. Furthermore, we welcome greater collaboration with like-minded organisations within the sector to leverage core competencies and reach beneficiaries in need.” About Food Fortification Initiative: FFI is a public, private and civic partnership that aims to improve health globally by assisting governments, regional bodies, food producers and implementing agencies to implement and monitor food fortification programmes. For more than 20 years, FFI has worked across geographies to support the large-scale fortification of flour and rice with essential nutrients like iron, folic acid, and zinc to combat micronutrient deficiencies and their consequences, including iron-deficiency anaemia and birth defects of the brain and spine. About Fortify Health: Fortify Health is a non-profit that works to enable access to micronutrient-rich chakki atta to reduce and prevent iron-deficiency anaemia. Fortify Health does this through three key workstreams:
For more information about Fortify Health’s work, please visit https://www.fortifyhealth.global/who-we-are.html For more information about FFI’s work, please visit https://www.ffinetwork.org/  Fortify Health is pleased to announce a collaboration with the Centre for Rural Development and Technology (CRDT) at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. This partnership aims to conduct a validation study for iCheck iron, a rapid testing device for determining iron rates in fortified chakki atta.
Fortify Health is on a mission to enable access to micronutrient chakki atta in order to reduce and prevent iron-deficiency anaemia. This collaboration with IIT Delhi's CRDT, a renowned academic unit with over 300 high-impact publications, aligns with our aim to improve the quality of fortified chakki atta distributed in India. The iCheck iron validation technology, developed by Bioanalyt in Germany, is a rapid testing device used by Fortify Health to test the added iron (from NaFeEDTA) in fortified atta. While the manufacturer has conducted primary validation for different iron sources, the unique variability of Indian atta necessitates a separate validation process. The project aims to inform external stakeholders, including academics, industry professionals, and policymakers, about the reliability of iCheck iron test results for wheat flour in Indian settings. The primary focus of the validation will be on chakki atta, with an additional matrix effect study on maida and iron source as NaFeEDTA. We look forward to sharing the results and learnings from this study with the general public. Fortify Health will implement the study by conducting the experimental activities, while IIT Delhi will provide technical oversight and expertise on the experimental design, the validation process, data analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of the findings. Tony Senanayake, Chief Strategy Officer of Fortify Health, noted: "By combining IIT Delhi's technical and academic expertise with our on-the-ground implementation focus, we hope to amplify the impact of data and evidence generated by this project. This will ultimately support our goal of reducing and preventing iron deficiency anaemia in India and fortifying India for the 21st Century." Prof. Hariprasad P., Associate Professor at IIT Delhi, mentioned: “Anaemic conditions are brought on by inadequate daily iron intake or the body's low ability to absorb iron. It prevents the biosynthesis of haemoglobin, which lowers the body's supply of oxygen and causes various connected health issues. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS) - 5 reports raised the alarm about the increasing anaemia among Indians. The most effective and scientifically validated approach to resolving this issue is food fortification. Earlier, fortification of salt with iodine and oil with vitamins had remarkable success. However, iron fortification through food has its own challenges, such as scalability, economics, uniformity and quality, distribution, shelf life, regulations and policies, especially in a country like India, which is home to 17% of the world's population and has a very diverse population in terms of religion, culture, and demographics. This study collaboration between Fortify Health and IIT Delhi intends to solve present and future problems brought up at various stages of food-iron fortification programmes in India.” For more information about Fortify Health and this collaboration, please visit https://www.fortifyhealth.global/ About Fortify Health Fortify Health is a health-focused organization dedicated to enabling access to micronutrient-rich chakki atta to reduce and prevent iron-deficiency anaemia. By adding value to chakki atta through fortification with Iron, Folic acid, and Vitamin B12, Fortify Health aims to improve the nutritional intake of millions of Indians. About IIT Delhi The Indian Institute of Technology Delhi is a public technical and research university located in Delhi, India. It is one of the oldest Indian Institutes of Technology in India. The Centre for Rural Development and Technology (CRDT) at IIT Delhi is renowned for developing and disseminating technologies to address rural India's challenges. Team retreats or offsites provide a unique opportunity to build connectedness, motivation and communicate with your whole team. However, they can be a daunting event to prepare for and often do not live up to their potential. In this post, we share some tips on how to prepare content for a team retreat. Recently, Fortify Health held a full team retreat in Bhopal, India. Fortify Health is a non-profit organisation with the mission of enabling access to micronutrient-rich wheat flour to reduce and prevent iron-deficiency anaemia. Altogether 36 teammates from across India and the world gathered for a three-day retreat, which was then followed by a smaller, 2.5 day leadership retreat. In a feedback survey, participants gave a score of 4.8 out of 5 (likert scale) on the statement, ‘I feel much more energised and motivated for my work after the retreat.’  We've learned many valuable lessons as we prepared for our recent retreat, and we'd like to share them with you in this blog post. Here, we provide a high-level process for preparing for your next team retreat and some of the lessons we learned along the way. It must be noted that we are far from experts when it comes to event planning. However, event planning can often be very expensive, and we hope our experiences may be able to support you in the future. We break the process of preparing content for a retreat into the following four key steps: 1. Ideation 2. Agenda Development 3. Content Preparation 4. Retreat Time  Step 1: Ideation
Goal Setting: As with almost any task, a clear understanding of the goals or purpose of the retreat is critical. Fortify Health leadership brainstormed a list of goals and then synthesised these into a prioritised list of five goals: connectedness, strategic alignment and clarity, understanding, collaboration and motivation. Lessons learned:
Brainstorm Sessions: Work with your team to brainstorm a long list of sessions that you may wish to run. In some cases, the specific content of the session may be uncertain, but you may have ideas on the format of sessions (workshops, town halls, speeches etc.) These sessions should align with the goals you have set out and may be both formal and social in nature. Lessons learned:
Step 2: Agenda Development Develop high-level agenda: Now you can think about the flow of sessions and how to choose the sessions you wish to run. Prepare a spreadsheet to visualise the time you have available during the retreat. For our retreat, we broke down the time into 30-minute blocks and colour-coded sessions based on: personal-time, mandatory content sessions, optional sessions, social time and breaks / buffers. Lessons learned:
Iterate and finalise the agenda: Take feedback and iterate on your agenda. At this point, worry less about the content of the individual sessions and more on the overall flow of the retreat. Lessons learned:
Step 3: Content Preparation Individual session preparation: Time to prepare the sessions themselves. We took guidance from teachers who are experts in preparing content for groups. We started by delegating session preparation to different team members who were then asked to prepare a lesson plan. This lesson plan broke each session into 5-minute sections and was colour-coded for different types of engagement within the session: presenter-led, moderated discussion, individual work and facilitated group work. The aim was that each session would have a combination of different types of activities to ensure that engagement was maintained. After lesson plans were signed off, session leads prepared slides and other materials. Some speakers created scripts, while others simply used their slides as talking notes. Finally, each session lead provided details to the operations team on logistic needs for their sessions. Leading up to the retreat: The team held a call to review the preparation for each session in detail. We recommend holding this call at least a week before the retreat commences. This call took over 2-hours, but built confidence that everything was in place and contingencies were taken into account. Lessons learned:
Step 4: Retreat Time By the time you reach the retreat venue, all speakers and organisers should feel confident about the content flow. However, we all know that there will be last minute curveballs and unexpected occurrences. We found it helpful to get to the venue early to scope out the space and think about whether our logistic plans still made sense. We recommend holding a quick briefing before the retreat starts to ensure everyone is on the same page. At the end or start of each day, we found it helpful to regroup as a leadership and operations team to debrief. During the debrief we would share learnings and feedback and iterate on our plans. We hope that this guide will help you as you prepare for your next team retreat! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out at tony.senanayake@fortifyhealth.global  2020 has been a strange year for everyone and every organisation. Fortify Health’s own milestones may not be as concrete as in previous years, and instead our lessons from 2020 became our milestones - it was not the year we expected, yet we made the most of it. All things considered, we've learned and grown a lot as an organisation and as a team, and a major highlight has been the strength of our team and what this means for Fortify Health going forward. As travel restrictions ease, we’re hopeful that 2021 will bring further opportunity and growth.
We asked our team to share what some of their most helpful lessons and milestones have been from 2020, both on an organisational level and at a programmatic level. Below is a summary of our 2020 growth based off of all of the team’s inputs. Organisational lessons and milestones 1) We've all learned to work collaboratively and empathetically with a completely remote team
3) We've put a strong focus on mentorship and implementation of consistent documentation across the team
1) We've built in-house technical capacity thanks to a stellar program team
3) We've overcome M&E barriers by procuring the iCheck
4) We've started to receive recognition as a legitimate player in the fortification sector thanks to more emphasis on communications
So to summarise, 2020 was a year of building more robust organisational systems, strengthening our team capacity to set us up for a faster-paced 2021, and learning. Our team, despite almost doubling in size over the course of 2020, has even reported being especially busy compared to the previous year, because setting up these systems, incorporating new strategies and coordinating hiring takes significant time, planning, discussion and effort. What next? In 2021, we have a lot to look forward to! We're excited to grow our team capacity (hiring for several new positions!), increase our number of mill partnerships, expand M&E activities, scale up our government and marketing work, build our brand further through improved communications, and potentially conduct another round of fundraising with GiveWell. 2021 will be busy, collaborative, and productive, in the best of ways - and all with the intention of improving lives at-scale!
We are delighted to share that Fortify Health has received a GiveWell Incubation Grant of ~$1,000,000. This grant will provide the organisation with two years of funding for operations in Maharashtra and West Bengal, from implementation to expanding the team. In Fortify Health’s third year of existence (from mid-2019), the focus is on scaling up implementation.
June 2019 to May 2020: First year of GiveWell Incubation Grant Over the first year of GiveWell’s 2-year grant, the funding will be directed primarily towards expanding open market wheat flour fortification and building strong partnerships in our two focus states: Maharashtra and West Bengal. Our goals for May 2020 are:
June 2020 to May 2021: Second year of GiveWell Incubation Grant The second year of funds will be used to continue the mill partnerships and involvement in government programmes achieved in the first year, and to maintain our team. In order to keep expanding in Year 2, we will need to apply for further funding from GiveWell or other sources. Possibility of further expansion and strategy direction are also dependent on new research that may alter effectiveness or cost-effectiveness estimates of fortification. In early 2020, we will refine our strategy for the trajectory of Fortify Health’s operations. Thank you The receipt of these funds is a testament to the work of our team over the past two years, who have been driven, dedicated and collaborative along the journey to this milestone. We would also like to thank each and every individual who has supported and advised us along the way, including but not limited to:
 We couldn't be more excited to welcome Dr. Urmi Bhattacharya in her new role as Country Director to the Fortify Health team. Urmi joins with extensive experience relevant to fortification, management, and monitoring & evaluation. Prior to joining Fortify Health, Urmi was a Research Manager at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) South Asia for four years, where she managed six large scale programmes across five states in India, including two fortification studies. She has also served as the Global Head of Monitoring and Evaluation for Uganda and India at STIR Education. Urmi earned her PhD in Economics from Indiana University in 2012 and has since dedicated her passion and skills towards making high quality education and health systems accessible to all people.
We’re delighted to announce that over the past few weeks we’ve welcomed on board three new full-time team members. After completing our first ever round of recruitment over the summer months, we’ve hired a Programme Officer, a Partnerships Officer, and a Senior Partnerships Officer. Introducing:  Shweta, Programme Officer Shweta has worked as a Research Associate at JPAL South Asia on Non-Communicable Diseases project. She led the RCT study in Mumbai that assessed the impact of reminder call services on compliance to diabetes treatment among elderly populations. Shweta has also worked with the Overseas Development Institute as a Research Intern, studying perceptions of youth on working in the agricultural sector, and its impact on agriculture in Uganda and Ghana. She has completed MSc in Anthropology and Development from the London School Of Economics.  Muneer, Partnerships Officer Dr. Muneer holds a Master’s in Health Administration from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and a Bachelor’s in Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery from Amrita University. Before joining Fortify Health, he was working with Public Health Resource Network in Delhi coordinating the end to end implementation of a nutrition programme in Odisha. His interests include public health, nutrition, anthropology, international politics, history and geography. He is an aficionado of ghazals and Indian classical music.  Shiva, Senior Partnerships Officer
Shiva holds a degree in social work from CSRD- Institute of Social Work and Research, Ahmednagar with academic achievement of clearing UGC, NET. He previously worked with STIR Education as a Senior Program Manager, where he was closely associated with ministries and the education department in Delhi, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. He was a also Gandhi Fellow, working on School Leadership Development with the Govt. schools in Gujarat. His interest lies with evidence-based interventions, government partnerships, and policy intervention. |
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