Taimaka Project
Accelerating innovation to make malnutrition treatment better, cheaper, and simpler, so that every child who needs it can get it.
Acute malnutrition is the leading cause of under-five childhood deaths because only 25% of children get treatment. We reaching the other 75% through 1) world-class treatment in Nigeria, and 2) incubating innovations that can make treatment better, cheaper, and simpler.
Our world class community management of acute malnutrition (CMAM) program saves the lives of children in northeastern Nigeria by providing therapeutic foods, medications, and vaccinations until they recover. Our innovations incubator allows us to pilot game-changing innovations within this CMAM program, to make treatment better, cheaper, and simpler.
In the short term, we’re leveraging these innovations to run the most cost-effective malnutrition treatment program in the world. Long-term, we’re scaling these innovations through other CMAM partners so that they can reach every child. This approach allows us to deliver guaranteed impact in the form of lives saved in our program, while also letting us take long-shot, low marginal-cost bets with large payoffs.
We have received acclaim from Founders Pledge, which recommends us as an early-stage charity; USAID, which funded us through its Feed the Future program; and the Center for Effective Global Action at U.C. Berkeley who wrote that Taimaka combines the rigor of academia with the dynamism of a startup.