Vitamin Angels Goes to Kenya
Vitamin Angels’ Founder and President Howard Schiffer is heading to Western Kenya for a two week observational tour of our prenatal program. Joining him is Vitamin Angels’ Development Coordinator Jessamyn Wead, Vitamin Angels’ resident photographer Matt Dayka, and some friends from Ocean Nutrition and Twinlab.
Our group will visit the Riley Mother and Baby Hospital in Eldoret, a facility that partnered with Vitamin Angels in 2009 and helped us to grow one of our largest prenatal programs. Our team will then head into rural access areas to meet with beneficiaries and observe vitamin distributions benefiting pregnant and lactating mothers.
Kenya is estimated to have the third largest under-five population living with Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) in Africa, after Niger and Ethiopia. Last year, Vitamin Angels reached over 32,000 mothers and distributed 11,882,250 prenatal vitamins in Western Kenya!
The World Health Organization reports that within Kenya:
-32% of infants are exclusively breastfed for the first 6-months of life.
-8% of newborns are born with a low birth weight.
-55.1% of women 12-50 years-old are anemic
-12.3 percent of females are underweight
notes from the field:
Hope in a Bottle - June 11, 2011
The Voices of Western Kenya - June 8, 2011
Healthy Beginnings in Western Kenya - June 5, 2011
Keep checking back in on this page for Notes from the Field, new photos, and Twitter updates from the trip!
A Special Thanks to:
Our partners at Ocean Nutrition and Twinlab for joining us on this grand adventure!
To the companies below who donated product to make our work in Kenya possible, and to all of our financial contributors who support projects like this one all around the world.
