Semilla Nueva: Curt Bowen on How Funders Can Better Understand the Organizations They Work with

Carolyn Robinson: Could you please start by introducing yourself and tell me about your work?

Curt Bowen: I’m Curt Bowen. I grew up in Idaho, and when I was in college I started doing some service work in Central America. I got excited about the idea of making big changes, stuff that was bigger than building houses or helping a village. How could we think about deeper structural issues? If we’re looking at, say, rural poverty in Central America or malnutrition in Central America, what is a solution that could actually work, and scale?

What we ended up getting excited about was malnutrition, the number one cause of childhood death around the world. One interesting thing is that the rates of malnutrition are plummeting around the world, but where the number of malnourished kids is increasing is in populations that are fully dependent on corn.

Corn is just a uniquely bad food in terms of how much nutrition is in it. Guatemala is the epicenter, along with southern Mexico. It’s also the main staple for most of Sub-Saharan Africa. There are a lot of similar problems between a small village in Guatemala and Honduras, or a small village in Rwanda or Kenya.

We have a lot of interventions that can help farmers’ incomes go up, but we don’t know how to dramatically increase their nutritional intake. This is a reason that Bill Gates is always saying, “If I had a magic wand and I could fix one of the problems I care about, it’d be nutrition,” because it’s so important and it’s so hard to fix. 

Corn is the cheapest way to fill people’s bellies. On a dollar a day you can feed a family of five if primarily what you’re eating is corn tortillas. The second you try to get some eggs or some beans in the diet, you can’t cover the whole family anymore because those foods are so much more expensive. If you ask most Guatemalan kids, at least in rural areas, what is their favorite food, they’ll say tortillas, which they probably eat three times a day.

It’s hard to tell people that the thing at the foundation of their culture isn’t healthy, so please eat more expensive things. That message just doesn’t get across. So how can we make the corn better? It turns out that scientists have come up with these naturally bred corn seeds that are a complete protein. They have more iron, they have more zinc. All the stuff that kids are missing from corn, you can fix with corn.

The big problem we ran into was that we could come up with these superseeds, but farmers wouldn’t care about it if the seeds had lower yield. They didn’t want to lose money for nutrition. We spent years trying to figure this out. We spent years trying to get people to not eat corn, that didn’t work. Years trying to get people to accept healthy corn with lower yields, that didn’t work. Finally, we pivoted into just breeding the seeds to be super high yielding and have nutrition, and if there’s no way to do that profitably, then let’s subsidize seed companies to sell those seeds super cheap. Let’s figure out all the economic and health benefits, and convince the governments to pay for those subsidies.

It’s a three-pronged model. Those are the three pieces, and they’re all very different. One is a science piece, one is a market piece on how to do subsidies to scale, and the third is a politics piece. We’ve started to get good at those three things. We’ll have about two million people eating our more nutritious corn this year, and we’re shooting for three or four million the following year, and going up from there.

Carolyn Robinson: When did you start all of this?

Curt Bowen: In 2009, I moved to Guatemala. I was 21, finished my undergrad, thought I was going to do a little six-month project before going for a PhD. I’m very bad at time estimates. That six months has become 16 years.

Carolyn Robinson: Is your approach different from other kinds of malnutrition ventures in the world? What might people find surprising about what you do?

Curt Bowen: There’s some really good efforts to fortify flour where people are eating industrially processed flour. America took the lead on this back in the 1920s and ’30s when we required fortification. There’s also some great efforts pushed by the Gates Foundation. One of my favorites is Sanku. They fortify really small mills. It’s a neighborhood-sized mill or a small city-sized mill.

With corn, as it’s getting ground up, we shoot in B vitamins, iron, and zinc et cetera. It’s probably more cost-effective, at least than what we do right now. It’s hard with that approach to get to the super rural population. Nearby is a tiny house where they grow corn and take it to a little mill. You can’t fortify that. That’s where the seed development side [of this project is more effective].

There has been some work on bio fortifying corn seeds in the past. The big difference was their theory of getting people to pay more for more nutritious corn. Convince the poorest of the poor to pay a premium? We haven’t been able to see anybody pull that off yet. Instead of trying to get consumers to pay more for nutrition, let’s try to switch the supply. Switch what’s available in the market.

Carolyn Robinson: Can you talk more about the communities you serve, and how they benefit from all this?

Curt Bowen: Guatemala is similar to a lot of places in East Africa. A quarter of the population lives on a corn farm. The vast majority of people eat a ton of corn. There are two or three levels of impact.The first is the consumer. What we want is for the average person in a tiny village or little city to buy their daily tortillas that happen to be made with a corn that’s super nutritious. They don’t know about it, they don’t care, and they’re getting the protein, iron, and zinc they need. We have about two million people right now in Guatemala and El Salvador at that level.

The second level is the farmer. 85% of the 1 million corn farmers in Guatemala don’t have enough money to buy good corn seeds. They replant the seeds they’ve had from the previous harvest. Their yields are always really, really low. Their average yield is similar to our average yield in America 150 years ago. When you swap out the seed for something that’s higher yielding, you can bump that up 50%. Getting the yield up 50% is enough extra money, about $200 or $300, to send your kid to high school for a year.

For us, we go to the farmer and tell them we have an especially good seed at a subsidized price, in any of the little stores where they buy their fertilizer and other supplies, for about $20.  If they pay this amount, they can get $200 more income. That’s a very good deal that’s accessible for them. They get many more dollars worth of corn. They’ll go from not producing enough to have food for the year, to now having extra food and being able to sell some, or being able to sell a good chunk more and put their kids through school. The enhanced farmers’ seed is a livelihood intervention. That becomes the motor to get tons of farmers to do it, get all this extra corn nutrition into their kids, and then sell this corn in the market where it gets eaten by people in rural areas.

The third level is the seed companies. We tell them that most farmers can’t afford their product. We offer to give them a seed and all the genetic information so they can produce and sell it. If they sell it below market price, we’ll pay them the difference. We’ll basically allow the seed companies to sell something that should cost $40 for a farmer, and allow them to sell it at $20, by giving them an extra $20 when they show us their sales for compensation. The seed companies see this as a great opportunity to expand market share and reach an entire customer segment they never thought they could.  

Carolyn Robinson: Are you partnering with the government on any of this?

Yes. The fourth piece is going to the government. We ask them how much are they paying right now per farmer, who are they also serving with social programs? Right now it’s $80 to $90, with very bad quality seed given out at the wrong time of the year. Farmers hate it. Everybody’s upset about it. We ask them to put a line item in the national budget that goes straight into the subsidy, and offer to administer it so there’s good oversight. We tell them that they’ll be able to point to this, and show that a very tiny bit of money in the budget is helping a huge amount of happy farmers.

We then have events with those farmers and bring members of Congress to speak. That led to last year a line item for $650,000 directly for our subsidy. We’re hoping to bump that up to $1.3 million this year. The core cost of the program in Guatemala, namely the subsidy cost itself, is now mostly paid for by the Guatemalan government.

Carolyn Robinson: Are you thinking of expanding this to other nearby countries or other places? Is your model exportable?

Curt Bowen: Yes. One of the hard things is you’ve got to develop the seeds. Seeds for Central America won’t necessarily grow in Africa. What’s great is that seeds in Guatemala do really well in Honduras and El Salvador, so it’s not hard for us to just repeat the model in those countries. In El Salvador this year, we’ll have about 2,000 farmers who are going to purchase our seeds through the subsidy. We developed all of the program with the government from the beginning. We designed the branding. We designed which seed companies they wanted to invite into the program, and the amounts. Everything was done directly with the government and we’re just paying the direct cost for the pilot at the beginning, which is ramping up now.

I’m hoping we’ll go from 2,000 farmers this year to 10,000 farmers next year. In Honduras, the first sales are starting next year. We’re developing seeds right now to work with partners in East Africa. We’re taking the best seeds from some of the folks Rippleworks has supported, like One Acre Fund, and breeding them to have more nutrition. Then we’ll give those seeds back to them, so they can tweak their existing program and use nutritious seeds instead of normal seeds.

Carolyn Robinson: Everybody learns from what doesn’t work as well as things that do. Could you describe more about what you learned?

Curt Bowen: Number one, it’s really hard to get the poorest of the poor to pay more for a more nutritious food. It’s also really, really hard to get the poorest of the poor to do a whole bunch of extra work for a more nutritious food. 90% of nutrition interventions collapse if you accept those two premises, because mostly you’re trying to sell super poor families by telling them there’s this magic thing called nutrition, which is their 15th priority, and mothers need to spend 10 hours more a week on top of all the stuff they’re doing to grow a garden or buy far more nutritious foods, plus these are much more expensive. It’s very hard to sell that. Nutrition is a long-term abstract thing.

All of us can identify with this in our own lives. If you’re super crunched, and you have a very hard deadline, you’re not going to be as interested in probiotic gut health foods that day. You’re under a lot of stress. You look for the easiest way to get some food so you can get the next thing done. If we can change our mindset to think about folks in a small village in Kenya or Guatemala as having a very similar situation in this way to our own normal lives, we can start to think about what’s going to work a lot better. 

Number two, the best way to scale is to figure out how to align incentives. Seed companies, what do they want? They want to make more money selling seed. Cool. We will figure out how to make that a piece of the program. Farmers want to make more money. They want to grow more corn, and they want their inputs to be cheaper. How do we do that? Nobody cares about nutrition. Fine. Politicians want votes. How do we take those four things and wrap them all up together in a way where it’s a win for everybody?

The best way to scale is to figure out how to align incentives.

– Curt Bowen

Carolyn Robinson: Where do you get most of your funding? Is it from foundations, grants, private sector, government, et cetera?

Curt Bowen: Foundations, individuals, and now local governments. About 10% of our budget this year is from the Guatemalan government. We’re shooting to get to 20% of the budget from the Guatemalan government next year.

Carolyn Robinson: Were you relying on foreign aid, namely USAID?

Curt Bowen: 55% of our budget this year was USAID.

Carolyn Robinson: How are you dealing with that issue?

Curt Bowen: It was extremely rough. USAID owed us a bunch of money from the 2024 work that we had done, which had not been paid for, or evaluated to be paid for. Almost 20% of our 2025 budget was money that was supposed to be coming in just from the 2024 work that had not been covered as it was supposed to be. Plus all the 2025 money was gone. It was brutal. We got the news and we let go almost 25% of the team. We cut programs. We scaled back Honduras. We scaled back El Salvador. We cut everything. We had two big RCTs randomized controlled trials, chopped those, put them on pause, and then just fundraised like crazy.

We were extremely lucky that a lot of our donors stepped in, and some new ones came through as well. We got a lot of help, which allowed us to restart. We’re now in the process of building back and putting some things in play for the great inflection point we have right now. We’re getting those people back on track, but it was absolutely brutal. We thought we’d cracked USAID. We had our first big multimillion-dollar grants, great relationships to people in DC and the local missions, and then it just all changed.

Carolyn Robinson: It sounds like you’ve been pivoting pretty quickly to try to figure out a new strategy.

Curt Bowen: We did a big presentation at Skoll exactly about this. Kevin Starr at Mulago Foundation really helped us think through some of this stuff. What we were able to realize over the last six months is that we built a strategy to convince big aid to invest, and use big aid money to eventually convince local governments to pay for it. Do all the RCTs, get tons of farmers, get all the recognition, work with all the big-name partners. Build this critical mass of progress and then eventually the government will pay. Most organizations have the strategy that we’ll do all these things, and then eventually, local government will take over these programs.

What we realized is if we took the same amount of work that it took us to get USAID money in the first place and threw that effort directly and immediately at getting local governments to pay instead, we could probably skip that whole middle step. It’s hard because getting governments to pay is a totally different skill set. Going from foundations to USAID is one thing. Going from foundations to the Rwandan president is a totally different ball game, but eventually, it’s going to be the skill set we need, so why not just do it?

Carolyn Robinson: Regarding Rippleworks in particular, what kind of support did you receive?

Curt Bowen: Rippleworks is great. We did some of the staff training work, and the Leaders Studio. That helped a lot. We put a lot of our mid-level management staff through that process, which was great because it was right as we were going from a three-level organization to a four-level organization. We’ve been able to give that middle management group some great training. We also did a project that focused on how to get farmers to become advocates to the government. That was fascinating. We needed a structured way to think about a thing that we were going to start, we thought, years down the road. It ended up being a thing that was very pertinent, very fast. It was great to have an expert group who just continually pushed our thinking around laying the groundwork for eventually getting governments to pay.

Carolyn Robinson: Did you get a talent grant as well?

Curt Bowen: Yes. We were able to get a big one-time investment followed by a talent grant, which was huge. We were getting ready to blow up the model for expanding to multiple countries, for having a new round of seeds that would get seed companies to grow their demand, and for expanding our payment to those companies so they could sell to more and more farmers, and show the government that this works.

That all happened in early 2023 and it laid the groundwork for everything. If that funding had not hit it at exactly that time, we’d probably be a third as far as we are right now. It was just the perfect inflection point cash.

Carolyn Robinson: Was there anything about either the talent grant or the Leaders Studio that you would change to make it more useful specifically for your organization? Was there anything you learned from these experiences?

Curt Bowen: For the Leaders Studio, our folks have some English, but especially at that level, having more Spanish would be amazing. 

Another suggestion would be building a basics course for 12 weeks, once a week on how to think through building a project, and standardize that. It’s a bit too complex for somebody like us to do ourselves. There aren’t good options locally to do that kind of training. Middle management training would be awesome for a lot of organizations.

Carolyn Robinson: Did you also have the expert office hours?

Curt Bowen: Yes, we did a couple. We could take more advantage of that. It was also hard because sometimes we need very niche-y training. The biggest challenge is the senior level leaders, myself included. Everybody is working super hard, and they’re underwater. It takes a lot of cognitive effort to figure out that one thing you really need, like your blind spot.

I put myself in the same bucket. Sometimes it’s hard for me to understand the thing I’m struggling with the most, and then find an expert to help me. Then it’s a whole process to explain everything, filter through experts, and talk with them. Maybe it works out, maybe it doesn’t. It ends up being a whole cognitive process. There’s enough barriers to entry that I might not take advantage of experts as much as I could.

I’m not sure how to fix that. I’ll tell my team that we have an issue in finance, for example, and they should contact an expert from Rippleworks. It can take 8 to 12 weeks for them to find a time to really think it all through, and put this on paper. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, and I don’t know how to fix that. It’s interesting.

Carolyn Robinson: Are you saying that perhaps if Rippleworks suggested you might need some help with a particular issue, rather than you having to come up with the request, it might be more helpful?

Curt Bowen: I think what ends up happening is, it’s almost that we as a leadership team need to do it, and the whole leadership team meets with a couple different Rippleworks people to pick three or four topics for six months. You get fully aligned and then you go execute. That’s a high ask in terms of leadership team investment, but it could make a big difference.

Carolyn Robinson: Thinking about Rippleworks compared to other funders you’ve had, how does their process of deciding what kind of capacity-building support to provide differ from other funders that you’ve experienced?

Curt Bowen: I don’t think we’ve had anybody who’s done that. The closest thing we’ve had is that since we were GLG fellows, we can use the GLG network, a network where you find an expert and have an hour phone call. It’s hard to get the problem perfectly scoped, and sometimes there are barriers to go through the whole selection process. Sometimes it’s easier to just investigate a deal yourself, or try your best idea. I’m wondering if maybe it would also be helpful to get our board involved. There might need to be more of a critical mass around picking very important themes.

Carolyn Robinson: What do you think funders don’t understand, and should know, about capacity building?

Curt Bowen: This question of how to build a pathway to expanded leadership and professional capacity at the mid and low levels of your staff. Obviously, it’s hard to standardize that across organizations that do dramatically different things, but how to make a Gantt chart a project management tool assisting in the planning and scheduling of projects of all sizes, how to plan a project, how to build a budget. Very simple stuff that we as organizations either just expect people to figure out on their own, or learn through osmosis, like conflict resolution. It’d be great to level up the whole organization on these basic things.

Carolyn Robinson: How big is your organization? 

Curt Bowen: 50 people.

Carolyn Robinson: Thinking about all the different funding support you’ve received, what have been the biggest challenges? Are there any changes needed in funding that would support you better?

Curt Bowen: In terms of funding, Rippleworks does it very well. Everybody who’s worked with Rippleworks thinks they are great, and that they should fund more than one time. At the same time, big surges can be transformational if they’re done well. Their existing funding model is fantastic. Outside of the funding, though, one thing I know a lot of folks struggle with is making the high-level connections that you sometimes get through your board. For example, if we really need a C-suite person at Bayer, or we really need to talk to a minister in Kenya, the ability to use the Rippleworks network to help make those kinds of intros could be extremely powerful. 

Carolyn Robinson: What role does trust play in your relationship with funders?

Curt Bowen: One of our core values is transparency that empowers. It’s an open source ethos that’s going to turn some people off, but others will be really into it. Some people don’t like these 30-page reports every six months that go into details of where we messed up, here are the lessons learned, here’s what totally didn’t pan out. That’s our starting point. Being able to start from there, but then go even deeper, has been awesome. It takes time to build that bi-directionally where they can learn that there’s not extra stuff hidden behind the works that we’re showing. We can learn that we don’t have to oversell in order to maintain support.

Carolyn Robinson: How can a funder cultivate trust?

Curt Bowen: One of the most important things that funders can do is really understand the organizations they work with, so they can have a realistic expectation of the problems, warts, and everything that happens on the road. When you feel that from the funder, it makes all the difference in the world, because there are some funders that you know deep inside, as soon as they start to see a little chink in the perfect armor, they’re going to say the project is not working and they have other more perfect things to fund.

Most of the people in the Skoll, Big Bang ecosystem, which is where I’d put Rippleworks, they’ve been around the block so much that they know things break, and they know it’s hard working with governments in places like Guatemala or Tanzania. They can be aggressive events and ambitious, but at the same time, realistic. That tension is very important.

Carolyn Robinson: Are there any bold shifts in funding needed in order to strengthen the voices of those closest to the problem you’re working on?

Curt Bowen: Kevin Starr at Mulago Foundation nails this analysis. He taught many of us how to think about a lot of this, and helped us put words on things we’d already thought about. Kevin came out with some articles recently about how they used to think there’s four funders at scale, and realizing that there’s actually only two. With big aid out and philanthropy never going to be big enough, there are two groups that can pay for really big things. It’s either customers, or it’s governments. You’re always going to be shifting to some combination of this. 

For us, it’s a combination of both wanting farmers to pay for their seed, and the government subsidizing the price. But that means we have to get the government to change policy. They’re putting line items in budgets, shifting acquisition processes, and paying for stuff they otherwise wouldn’t. That involves, and this is where it gets extremely interesting, defining whether this is advocacy or lobbying. 

A lot of foundations will say they do not support lobbying. How do you get governments to pay for things without lobbying? How do you get governments to do things differently without lobbying? It becomes this very murky and dirty question of the difference between advocacy versus lobbying. Are you educating the government about a problem, versus trying to convince them to pay for it? You’re educating them about the possibility of paying, but not pushing them to pay. It’s really confusing. The funding world needs to figure out what they think about this, instead of pushing us into a phase where we have to embrace a murkiness that does not feel clean to me.

Carolyn Robinson: Have there been any funding approaches that were not helpful for the way you work that you wouldn’t want to do again?

Curt Bowen: Multi-year unrestricted grants that invest in the mission instead of a specific project is the way to go. The least we can be like USAID as funders, the better we’re all going to be. Ditch projects and fund missions. 

Carolyn Robinson: What do you need to grow and sustain your work? What are the three main things that you need?

Curt Bowen: Laura Hattendorf, who used to be second in command at Mulago, would say that the hardest thing for everybody at the beginning is getting your idea. Once you have that and it’s solid, the hardest thing is money and talent, and then the hardest thing becomes talent.

There’s another great opportunity for an organization like Rippleworks who wants to do more than just donate. The number one challenge that all of us have, after reaching a certain level of success and having proved the model, is talent acquisition and retention. It is extremely hard to get people who would be making 500k a year in the private sector with stock options to come work in the social sector for a fraction of that. For example, we had a great guy we wanted to hire and we could meet his salary, but his golden parachute at his current company was going to be $5-10 million, and there’s no way we’d be able to do that for him.

At the same time, there’s folks in the private sector who have incredible jobs and are looking for that thing where they can still work really hard and do incredible things, but also change the world. How do you connect those folks to social enterprises like ours? How do you find all those folks who are at McKinsey as an associate partner, for example, but they’re ready to go do something else, and suggest that they take over the SCO [supply chain and operations] with an amazing social enterprise in Africa for three years? Those worlds don’t really connect.

Carolyn Robinson: Could funders help this issue by facilitating these kinds of networks?

Curt Bowen: Yes, and that could be huge. I think about The Elevate Prize that’s trying to popularize stories of big social change. How do we get that kind effort focused on talent? I know if we had this kind of access, that is, if we could have people who are doing private sector work in the US for two or three years, we could go two to three times as far. How do you get them to know about what we’re doing?

What’s hard is that most of the best social entrepreneurs I know are really good at it because they get their heads down and work. They are not giving talks at conferences every two weeks and selling people on their organization. How do you build awareness of the best organizations? Help them build it. How do you build an entrepreneurship program or a pipeline of great talent to become co-funders at inflection points of these awesome works?

Carolyn Robinson: You mentioned money and talent. Anything else you need to grow and sustain your work? 

Curt Bowen: If you look at the Big Bang community, the folks like Dovetail Foundation, Cartier Philanthropy,  Pilot House, Rippleworks, and Mulago Foundation, the first piece is just getting idea clarity. The funders we have right now are such good thought partners. That piece feels solid. Funding’s big, talent’s big, and the other one is connections.

Funding’s big, talent’s big, and the other one is connections.

– Curt Bowen

Carolyn Robinson: What about research? Do you need help to do more research into the impact of your work, or perhaps more research into different kinds of corn varieties? You specialize in corn. Are you looking at any other seeds?

Curt Bowen: Well, no. It’s a huge piece of our model. A third of our model is just getting really good at corn breeding. There’s tons of research baked in. That’s where the connections piece becomes really valuable. For example, Bayer could say that as a CSR corporate social responsibility program, we want to donate a 100th of a percent of our corn research budget to help you figure out how to do this nutrition breeding, and that would solve all our problems. I’m seeing both the talent, to a certain extent, and the government, also to a certain extent, getting free research support from big companies. 

It all comes down to this question of how to put great innovative ideas on people’s radar. This gets tricky because there are organizations like ours that are super bad at self-publicity. We don’t go to all the conferences. We don’t send out mailers to hundreds of thousands of people. You’re not going to see a billboard or a train station ad that says, “Donate to Semilla Nueva. Save a child today.” We don’t do that. Instead, we come up with very effective things, get very good evidence behind it, and get big foundations to support us. We do the work, and the numbers speak for themselves. But because of that, we don’t have the brand or social recognition where a company is going to get super excited to donate some research time to us in the same way that they would for United Way or the Humane Society or whatever. I don’t know how you bridge that. It’s a really interesting problem.

It all comes down to this question of how to put great innovative ideas on people’s radar.

– Curt Bowen

Carolyn Robinson: Have you been tracking the impact on malnutrition itself in Guatemala and the places where you work? Have you seen a change in that?

Curt Bowen: Yes. We do a lot of tracking for farmer income, and tracking on the nutrition levels of the corn. We track how many people eat that corn, namely women, kids, pregnant women, lactating women, et cetera. We’ve done a couple RCTs looking at the changes in nutritional status based on people eating the corn. We’ve figured out where on the causal chain it’s effective. It’s feasible for us to do good impact evaluation. It gets pretty much all the way to people getting more nutrients into their bodies, and those bodies absorb those nutrients. To do an RCT on measuring growth in kids would take millions and millions of dollars, and multiple years. We just don’t have the budget to do something that big yet.

Carolyn Robinson: Do you want to share anything else about your work, your funding, or what you’re aiming to do next?

Curt Bowen: Two things. One other idea is, there’s a big movement in the effective altruism, GiveWell philanthropy world to dig into a specific cost-effectiveness analysis. One thing that could be also a path, and something very interesting to do, is to work on building up the muscle to help organizations do that cost-effectiveness analysis and then be able to present it to the funders that require it. It’s a specific language, and a specific way of thinking about and documenting things, but it can open up a whole new world of allies. There’s been a bit of a bifurcation with the high-impact world that doesn’t do that super crazy Excel math. There’s a world that only funds if it has that data behind it, but sometimes it’s not super connected to scalable things you can do in the real world. Some kind of merging of those two worlds, and given that both those worlds are deeply, deeply San Francisco, it could be really innovative.

The last thing I’d say is it can take organizations, at least us, years to really get the kinks worked out and get to something that’s scaling fast. I would encourage funders to keep their eye on that prize and put more focus on it, but also have the patience to work through the iterations that will help organizations get there.

Carolyn Robinson: Do you have a specific example that highlights and illustrates the impact of your work?

Curt Bowen: Using the RCTs that we’ve done in all the studies, we were able to build out a big predictive model of how much of Guatemala’s corn has become biofortified has led to how much of a reduction in stunting, and how much stunting costs Guatemala. It’s very impressive. Some estimate it at 14% to 17% of GDP, which is almost the same as remittances. It’s almost twice the amount of GDP of agriculture for the whole country. It’s astounding how much Guatemala loses to malnutrition.

The model we built basically shows that if we can get all the corn to be biofortified, we can probably cut malnutrition by 40%. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but if you run the math, we’re talking about per dollar going into the subsidy can be $20, $50, $100 of return in terms of health, which is great. It’s hard to detect this with a controlled sample, since you’re just in prediction, but this year we’ll have enough biofortified corn going out that we should be able to drop stunting by a point, which is tens of thousands of kids having 20% higher earnings for the rest of their lives, and a couple years more of life expectancy, which is wonderful. 

This year we should see 60,000 farmers feeding two million people and dropping stunting about a point across the country. Most of the families we work with have their story of buying a motorcycle for their kid after two years, and the kid now has a job. While the farm was making $100 a year, the kid is now making $200 a month. They’re using that salary to put three other kids through school, and they’re hoping that those kids will go on to make $300 or $400 a month. As a result, the dad has decided not to immigrate to the United States. 

Every time I start to get a little bit discouraged or tired or whatever, there’s always these two things you can rest your hat on. There’s the stats and the math and the big picture, and there’s that one family that you just saw last week.

Carolyn Robinson: Thank you for your time. We really appreciate it.

Carolyn Robinson Robinson led Solutions Journalism Network’s broadcast initiatives for many years. She is an experienced television producer/reporter for global news media such as CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera. As an international media development consultant, she has trained local journalists and directed media programs in two dozen countries around the world.

**This conversation has been edited and condensed.

View More Interviews