During my jog yesterday I listened to an inspiring pod-cast interview with Madhu Sridhar on the topic of the correlation between hunger and (lack of) education. Sridhar is the president of Stanford’s Tech Award winner 2009 Akshay Patra. Akshay Patra is a social innovation enterprise working to reduce hunger in India, – which, according to the Global Hunger Index is nr 66 out of 88 countries listed….

Stanford´s Tech Award honours entrepreneurs who use technology to spark social change. Akshay Patra got the prize for their effort to utilize technology to improve the quality of food served school children all over India. Madhu Sridhar argues that due to the enterprises innovative way of preparing (“gravity-flow-kitchen”) and delivering the meals it only cost 28 dollar to feed a child for an entire academic year! Due to the size and economy of the country a business model like this obviously need to be scalable and you need to be able to produce at a low price. Akshay Patra´s take on the challenge is impressive and I was pleased to hear that they buy all the ingredients from locale markets, which is of course helping the local economy, especially in rural areas.