Across Borders - About

Monthly Updates

July 2010 Update – Across Borders attends the Summit for Malnutrition in Jordan.

In 2000, 189 world leaders gathered for the United Nations Millennium Summit where they committed at the highest political level to a set of eight time-bound targets (by 2015) named the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Among some of the goals: eradicating extreme poverty, ensuring all boys and girls complete primary schooling, eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education, reducing child mortality rates, reducing maternal mortality rates, combating HIV/AIDS and malaria, reducing by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water, and further developing an open trading and financial system that is rule-based, predictable and non-discriminatory.

Mark Charles with Tushar Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi’s Great-Grandson!)

To eradicate extreme poverty (the 1st MDG) we need sustainable, long-term solutions. Sustainable solutions represent an investment towards a more productive society as most of these global issues (and their solutions) are delicately intertwined and affect one another directly. For example, children who are underdeveloped and malnourished have difficultly concentrating and can lose cognitive abilities. If they are fortunate enough to have access to a formal education, their ability to study and learn can be severely hindered. Some are simply too weak to attend school.

Worldwide, hunger & malnutrition take more lives than AIDS, malaria and TB combined. Over 1 billion people do not have enough to eat. Iron deficiency remains the most prevalent form of malnutrition – affecting 2 billion people annually. Eradicating iron deficiency would improve national productivity levels by 20%.

One such sustainable solution is Spirulina. Spirulina is a blue-green algae, known as a "super food" because of its extraordinarily high vitamin, mineral and amino acid content. Spirulina can be taken as a powder form, mixed in water, food or smoothies, and can also come in tablet form. It is the richest whole food source of protein, up to 70% of the nutrient, which is significantly greater than soybeans, meat and eggs. Spirulina is the highest vegetable source of iron, B12 and B6. It can be harvested naturally from lakes or cultivated manually using outdoor pond systems and covered greenhouses. Newly developed enclosed systems use transparent tubes or photo-bioreactors to grow this special algae.

Fredrick O. K. Lwamba, Mark Charles, Said Obama (President Barack Obama's
Uncle), Charles Ochome

IIMSAM stands for the Intergovernmental Institution for the use of Micro-algae Spirulina Against Malnutrition. This intergovernmental group was established to promote the use of Spirulina in developing countries, in partnership with the UN and their MDGs. IIMSAM serves the UN’s Economic and Social Council and maintains communication with the World Health Organization, the Food and Agricultural Organization, and the United Nations Development Program.

Our organization was introduced to IIMSAM through a business connection. After an in-person meeting in India and a robust proposal presenting our interest and potential in becoming a key player in the UN’s Spirulina "pledge" to developing countries, Across Borders was invited to Jordan to attend the global Summit for Malnutrition. There we meet with representatives from both the UN and IIMSAM, and discussed in detail our ability and proposed plan in becoming a key international distributor in their global Spirulina campaign.

Pretty exciting! See August’s update for the outcome :-)