(TWF learn with leaders' ) Devann:

Even with rising food security, malnutrition remains rampant. Devann: is cheap, easily stored and can be cooked anywhere and is an accessible source of most commonly lacking nutrients. 

Devann: is a instant meal which can be adapted into various lifestyles. It is a first barrier at preventing malnutrition and is created with urban poor in mind, especially a hurried lifestyle. The base formula is vegan, and the user can easy add in whatever leftovers/vegetables/spices they'd like.

We use vegan, locally sourced ingredients to make a formula-like porridge. All the ingredients are FSSAI aproved, and usually straight from farmers. The base is inspired by of traditional east Indian  infant and child food (containing protein, fibre, carbs etc) and of temple offerings(containing iron, vitamin C and fibre). We are working on also adding in Wheat sheera as a probiotic. 

We are trying to combat rampant malnutrition, especially in women and girls living in poverty. They generally work 84 hours a week, take care of their kids, ill and elderly and cook for their families sometimes without running water and electricity.

The findings show that as per DHS-4, 12.8% of urban poor mothers were short, 20.6% thin, 13.7% overweight, 21.1% obese, 57.4% anaemic and 32.4% had moderate to severe anaemia. The study proposes a greater focus on urban poor women while extending nutrition services as well as screening for anaemia. (The study is India-centric)

 Usually since protein is expensive, it gets substituted with carbs to fill the stomach and many a times junk food is the more cheaper option, robbing them of nutrients they need.

The community I work with has around 200 people, many with multiple kids. Long working hours, no running water and electricity, no access to healthy food due to high prices, unemployment due to pandemic. lack of information are biggest contributing factors.

In India (where we are based from), one in three girls aged 15-19 are stunted. Undernourished girls grow up to become undernourished women who give birth to a new generation of undernourished children. We hope to bring those numbers down.

Our target audience is the urban poor, the vegetable cart grocer, the help, the daily wage earner, people in the unorganized sector. They've been badly hit by Covid-19, and are in unemployment. Due to the pandemic, the prices of healthy foods are high and food security is scarce. They find it extremely hard to incorporate govt supplied supplemental pills in their daily lifestyles.

We devised our products with their hurried lifestyle  in mind, and realized that Devann: can be made by and for all members of the working class. It's easily adaptable to different tastes, and you can even add your leftovers for a delicious feast.

Devann: will provide them with a warm, comforting, filling and nutritious cheap instant meal, which is easily stored, can be cooked on gas, electric stove, microwave, kilns and over open fire. We hope it provides a much needed respite to malnutrition and gaps the bridge between households which can afford healthy choices to those which can't. 

We did intensive two weeks worth of on ground surveys, and then we spoke to paediatricians, local doctors, social workers, nonprofits like SHARP and  doctors without  borders. We recorded what our target base eats in a day over the course of a week and sussed out nutrients they were missing. We also looked at pre-existing data and research available on the public domain.

Something heart wrenching to know was that a lot of them considered starch water to be a viable meal when money was tight, and that due to protein being expensive it was substituted with carbs to fill up.

Then, we conceptualized multiple ideas and tested them out slowly, Devann: was the most adaptable one. 

We first spoke to the communities we were around and working with. We focused especially on the ones preparing the food and the ones consuming the least. In both cases, it turned out to be women of the families. We must have combined, spoke  to over a thousand people and recorded their thoughts, feelings, wants and needs. We first decided to start the first few ideas we shortlisted in our kitchen. If it wasn't adaptable, needed specific ingredients, couldn't be considered a proper meal we ruled it out. 

Currently, we are searching and testing for materials to keep the price down yet make the most nutritional and flavourful impact. We are also looking for a feasible way to add in a probiotic. Most likely, our probiotic will be plant based. We are also looking for the perfect flavour to appeal to the community.

We use ancestral methods involving as little waste as possible to cater the maximum nutritional needs of the urban poor. 

The second portion involving Iron, vitamin C and fibre is inspired from ancient temple offerings from east Indian, the base comes from ancestral food science, where components would be mixed in multiples of five and eight to create quick, filling delicious porridge. 

The product is easily stored and 'is second nature to cook' (direct quote from the first test).

We use traditional fermenting technique and technology to create wheat sheera, a vegetarian/vegan probiotic.

We haven't launched it yet, but on the small scale we are hoping on reaching 150-200 people atleast initially, and for next year our most ambitious number will be 200 families, assuming the average family has five members. We are looking for ways to keep the costs down, with buying wholesale and minimum support price and looking for hotels who would like to contribute.

We wish to lower the rates of Malnutrition in children, especially anemic girls. We hope that Devann: acts as a tool to help people living under the poverty line and people not in a financial well household to have better health, and we known prevention is better than cure. When they have greater access to good healthy food, they are likely to not fall ill. By providing something cheap, easy to make and nutritious, we hope to combat malnutrition and food insecurity, amplified by the pandemic.

We think this chart provides good clarity on why we need to make a dent in Malnutrition statistics: 

We will be using UNDP's indicator of health.

Lack of funds to manufacture product on a large scales, keeping down the production costs, registration money for the product.

When Kirtipriya's mother was a child in the idyllic hamlet of Mithlanchal, India there wasn't any conventional baby food: no pureed pumpkins or boxed  formulas. All there were was special mixes of grains, powders, porridges. Kirtipriya's brushes with her cultural and ethnic identity formed the base of Devann:'s values: mixing in traditional food science with modern art of nutrition. Her medical volunteering also helped with a lot of science stuff. She's the driving force behind our formulation.

The truth is, all our members volunteer regularly and have strong bonds in their community. For Nicholas, it was the experiences of some of his friends that drove him to Nutrition and food security. He efficiently and seamlessly combines solutions and eliminates parts, concepts, and ideas in a strange amalgamation of ruthlessness and kindness. 

Keisha's experiences with the community she regularly volunteers with brought on the formidable skills she has. She regularly spoke to paediatricians, nutritionists, local doctors, social and health workers and knows the needs of her community intimately, giving out the most inclusive and innovative ideas during conceptualization. In fact, she is also pursuing a UHT milk based formula on the same problem. Please remember to check out her Solved entry!

Jennah suavely combines ideation, prototyping and organization skills(along with Keisha, their organizational skills are forces of nature) and smoothly makes sure all the data is accurate. Jennah saw a part of her city where people live BPL, and this pushed her to empower their community. She also plans on becoming a doctor.

Learn with Leaders' Take the world forward fellowship, from which we got acquainted with each other and get much of our critique. We even met our mentor via TWF!

Devann: works for a sustainable way to end malnutrition. The ingredients  is majorly vegan/vegetarian, locally sourced from small farmers. With something that requires considerable less time to cook, it also lowers the use of wood and fossil fuel for cooking. 

Sustainable food production is “a method of production using processes and systems that are non-polluting, conserve non-renewable energy and natural resources, are economically efficient, are safe for workers, communities and consumers, and do not compromise the needs of future generations'' and vice versa,

 ''A first-of-its-kind, international study of 107,000 children finds that higher temperatures are an equal or even greater contributor to child malnutrition and low quality diets than the traditional culprits of poverty, inadequate sanitation, and poor education.'' 

We will use the prize to make sure everything from production, packaging to transportation is sustainable, and will look into how we can make our packaging double as a cooking tin/utensil not just once, but again and again. We will also look to make sure that any plastic, if used, is biodegradable.

We are trying to combat malnutrition in a single meal and women and girls are key shareholders affected.  The bane of child and maternal malnutrition is responsible for 15 per cent of India’s total disease burden, as per This source, which also talks about how it is a vicious cycle. 

Nutrition is both a maker and a marker of development. Improved nutrition is the platform for progress in health, education, employment, empowerment of women and the reduction of poverty and inequality, and can lay the foundation for peaceful, secure and stable societies.

As more and more women are becoming primary breadwinners in urban poor household, the need for them and their children to be properly nourished becomes pressing. With  easily more than 70 hours work week, rising food prices and fickle job security, food security and nutrition are first to be cut in face of a catastrophe, eg Covid-19 related fears, mandates and lockdowns.

We will be using the Social Prize to properly set up and start products, and it will be able to show us to have enough capitals to start taking investments/initial funds to make it non-profit.