What We Do
Taimaka has reimagined pediatric malnutrition treatment by making it more cost-effective and scalable. We’ve developed a malnutrition treatment model that is 1) 53% cheaper than legacy approaches and 2) simplifies clinical protocols so that digitally-enabled community health workers (CHWs) can deliver care directly to the most vulnerable communities.
So far, we’ve used our model to treat 6,000+ children out of existing government hospitals in northeastern Nigeria with world-class recovery rates of 95%+. Our track record has led charity evaluators like Founder’s Pledge to identify us as one of the most cost-effective nonprofits in global health, with a cost-per-life saved of $1,644. Over the next five years, we’re on track to expand our program to treat tens of thousands of children, while helping governments revamp their outdated programs so that they can treat 2x the number of children through our transformative treatment model.
Our History
The Taimaka Project was founded on a simple commitment – to do the most we could with every dollar we spent. We began with $10,000, four unpaid co-founders, and a cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) of a microfinance program that we thought could help tackle hunger and poverty in northeastern Nigeria. Today, we have 70+ employees, reach thousands of children with acute malnutrition in Gombe state, and innovate to help millions more.
In our first year, our vision for cost-effective impact led us to focus on a microfinance program – providing smallholder farmers in Nigeria with post-harvest loans to tackle food insecurity among some of the most vulnerable communities. In 2021, we ran a randomized control trial on this program in partnership with researchers at the University of California - Berkeley to evaluate its impact in line with our commitment to impact. After this comprehensive evaluation, we decided that our approach did not meet our own standards for using every dollar to do the most good possible, leading us to pivot to focus solely on our malnutrition work, which we began in early 2021. An extensive overview of this decision and our post-harvest loans program is available here.
Today, we work in the same communities, on the worst form of hunger – acute childhood malnutrition. Globally, 45.4 million children suffer from acute malnutrition, causing 3.1 preventable deaths annually. These children aren’t just sick either; those with severe acute malnutrition are 9-11x more likely to die than their peers, and those that do survive suffer from permanent setbacks to their immune systems, neurodevelopment, and future earnings potential.