Nutrition 4 Education and Development, N4ED, is a non-profit organization founded in august 2015. N4ED provides sustainable solutions for child development, women's rights, and economic growth by empowering vulnerable young women, households, and the community. Our mission
- To improve children’s nutrition, health, and overall early childhood development by empowering households as key influencers
in the lives of their children.
- To provide a continuum of services to the most vulnerable peri-urban young women. We want to create sustainable solutions for these communities enabling them to ensure nutrition, women’s rights and economic growth. Our vision is to become a non-profit organization offering services to vulnerable communities, empowering young women, supporting parents to reduce chronic malnutrition like stunting, and promoting early childhood development. The overarching aim is to impact poverty reduction, enabling future generations to reach their full potential. The values that shape the way we design our programs are:
- Avoid direct aid: we believe that aid creates dependency and is counter-productive. Besides, a project based on aid is not sustainable as its effect will end when the project ends. Therefore, all our programs are designed in a way that the population becomes self-sufficient.
- Act preventively: We are dedicated to addressing the underlying causes of the issues we tackle before they arise, aiming to achieve greater impact with minimal costs. Taking preventive measures not only enhances results but also optimizes resource utilization, allowing us to maximize effectiveness with efficient investments.
- Work with communities: we believe that real change comes from the bottom and we are eager to see concrete results. So, we implement projects to connect the tools put in place by policymakers and researchers with the end-users. N4ED was born from a simple observation: nowadays more and more children in poor communities go to school. However, this doesn’t seem to be enough for the communities to reach a certain level of development and be pulled out of abject poverty for good. This observation led to researches about the vicious circle of poverty and how it's intertwined with malnutrition at an early age. More and more studies are showing how this lack of development has a major consequence into reducing the human capital of an economy. So whether we see the problem as a humanitarian or as an economist, the response is the same : a sustainable poverty reduction can only be achieved if our future generations are fully developed, empowered and have their full potential available to learn and thrive. This is how they will become assets to their country and pull themselves and their communities out of the vicious circle of poverty. The COHA(Cost Of Hunger in Africa) estimates that the total economic impact of child under-nutrition in Ethiopia is the equivalent of 16,5% of its GDP. As a response, we are undertaking our missions to sustainably address this challenge and significantly contribute to poverty reduction.
