One of MOAS’ main projects is our #MissionOfHope: our famine relief and pharmaceutical aid deliveries to countries in crisis, such as Yemen and Somalia. We have been running this project since 2019 by working with partners to ship both therapeutic foods and medical supplies to local partners to treat child malnutrition and communicable disease.
In order for these deliveries to be successful, we need to collaborate with different partners throughout the different stages of the process, starting from the procurement of supplies all the way through to the distribution of aid in-country. We are very grateful to all our partners for their collaboration and professionalism, and this week we want to highlight the work of Edesia, our supply partner for the therapeutic foods needed to treat malnutrition. What follows is an overview of their work and the collaboration with MOAS thus far.
Who is EDESIA and what do they do?
Edesia is a unique non-profit organization, started in 2009 in the USA, that manufactures specialized ready-to-use foods that saves lives. Edesia makes 1.5 million packets of ready-to-use food each day, which have reached 13 million children since 2010. They send out an incredible 168,000 cartons of product per year, which requires over 2000 20-foot containers to ship.
They are specialized in the production of a range of different products aimed at treating and preventing malnutrition. All of Edesia’s humanitarian foods are ready-to-eat, fortified foods created on site at their purpose-built facility. Their products include Plumpy’Nut, Plumpy’Sup and Plumpy’Doz, formulated to treat and prevent moderate or severe acute malnutrition in children, as well as supplements for pregnant and lactating women.
Edesia partners with institutional partners, such as UNICEF or WFP, but also with INGOS like MOAS, to make sure that as many people as possible are reached by their nutrition programmes, including those who may not be covered by the main nutrition pipelines.
We recently had the chance to participate in a virtual tour of their factory and production facilities in Rhode Island, USA, to explore the process of production of these therapeutic foods and for an insight of their warehouses, operations and activities.
Their team of 110 employees working in the manufacturing facility does everything on-site. From research and development of the products, all the way up to sanitizing and packaging. They constantly research new products or formulas that might not only help treat malnutrition but also prevent it. Most recently they have started to run a commercial program selling products on the American market aimed at improving the nutrition of children and adults alike. All the proceeds from this initiative go back to Edesia’s non-profit work to further facilitate their research to develop new products and strategies to reach more people in need through outreach such as the projects run with MOAS.
Edesia and MOAS
Since 2019, we have been partnering with Edesia to send shipments of their therapeutic foods to countries in need. Thanks to this collaboration we have managed to send 4 40-foot containers of product, totalling over 100 tonnes of Plumpy’Doz, Plumpy’Sup and Plumpy’Nut to Yemen and one 24 tonne shipment of Plumpy’Sup to Somalia.
We are also managing three more shipments for Yemen and one to Somalia as we speak, which are planned to arrive later on this year, contributing a further 100 tonnes of product to communities in crisis.
Once the aid reaches Yemen or Somalia our local partners then manage the in-country distribution. In Yemen we collaborate with ADRA Yemen and in Somalia with International Medical Corps Somalia, who both take amazing care of the distribution through their nutrition clinics and re-feeding programs, to the vulnerable families who need it most.
Hearing the stories of children who have recovered from malnutrition thanks to our shipments of Edesia’s therapeutic food, like Hawo and Nurta or Jamila from Somalia, gives us the motivation to continue this life-saving project.
Edesia’s team, about the partnership with MOAS:
“Since 2019, Edesia has partnered with MOAS to delivery life-changing, ready-to-use foods to over 20,000 vulnerable and malnourished children in Yemen and Somalia. Edesia is grateful for MOAS’ role in identifying critical supply gaps and working urgently to provide aid in these desperate situations. Through their dedication to child nutrition, MOAS has helped save thousands of lives.”
We are extremely grateful to have this ongoing partnership with such professional and motivated partners as Edesia, because what we manage to do thanks to our partnership really makes a difference to the families served by the projects. We hope to carry on with this collaboration well into the future to keep coordinating shipments to countries in crisis and to help combat malnutrition wherever we can.
If you are interested in the work of MOAS and our partners, please follow us on social media, sign up to our newsletter and share our content. You can also reach out to us any time via [email protected]. If you want to support our operations, please give what you can at www.moas.eu/donate.
