Fish farming a solution to Kwashiorkor in children

Students4Kids: About 80 teams have submitted a project idea to this year’s competition of Students4Kids. The jury decided that your project is among the best. What do you think makes your project so special?

Ananias Nsiimenta: The project idea to fight hidden hunger through fish farming was observed by the team members to be a cheap and easy means of supplying proteins and other micronutrients to children and pregnant mothers. Basically the affordability, innovativeness, response to the current problem and the target group of our project idea make it special.

Hidden hunger is a problem with far-reaching consequences and a variety of causes. How did you come up with your specific idea against hidden hunger in Uganda?

Through observation in communities that we live in, the team was able to come up with such an idea to solve the problem.

You have until August 26th to work out your idea to a finished concept. What’s the work on that like for you? Are you all working together on the concept or have you for example split up the different tasks?

We split it up into different tasks and everyone was given time to come up with what is required of him or her at the accepted time when we will all meet to put together our findings.

The winning team of the Students4Kids competition will receive 10,000 euros as start-up funding for their project. What exactly would you do with the money?

In our project concept a budget has been drawn and if funds for its Implementation are available, this will be good for the kick starting of the implementation process.

You have done a lot of research on the topic of hidden hunger. What did you learn that you may not have known before? What do you think everyone should know about the phenomenon?

I hadn’t exactly known the cause of hidden hunger but through sharing with friends, we were able to learn that and devised a solution. The nature of the target group was also a learning area, not only children are suffering from hidden hunger but the effect is also faced by pregnant mothers and other breast feeding women. This therefore made us to include them since most micronutrients are involved in the early developmental stages of the neonates with whom the women hold in their wombs when pregnant. Also feeding of the children is done by the women.