Palm Springs Sunup Rotary Club

Thank you for coming to the Palm Springs Sunup Rotary Club

You express interest in our Rotary International Foundation Global Grants for Project Peanut Butter. 

Here is a short synopsis of the history Project Peanut Butter.

Tragedies followed by miracles

 

1. Dr Manary (Professor of Pediatrics at Washington University Medical School in St Louis, Mo.) during the 1990's was working with Doctors Without Boarders. He became very frustrated because the treatment at that time for Children with Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM Disease) didn't work. Only about 20% of children  responded. 80% either died or were severely mentally and physically disabled. 

Dr. Manary and his colleagues decided they needed to find a cure for Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM Disease). It had to be digestible to these children and a whole food high in protein that didn't need refrigeration (no refrigeration where these children live). After many experiments they developed a formula that cured these children 95% of the time. Under experimental protocols they prove it worked. World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, USAid, Doctors without Boarders and all other world health care groups made it the treatment of choice for SAM Disease.

 

2. Dr. Manary and his colleagues gave the formula to the public domain and didn't make it Proprietory. So profit making companies started making it in factories in the 1st world countries and selling it to world health organizations and transporting it to clincs in the developing areas instead of having it made in the countries. Thereby saving children, but no developing economy and thus helping the country progress.

3. Dr Manary decided that wasn't right so he went to Malawi and developed a program there named Project Peanut Butter (PPB). He set up a nonprofit in the USA and also one in Malawi. He developed PPB sustainable with farm, transportation, factories and clinics (including education of the families). Once he had PPB up and running in 2004 then WHO, UNICEF, USAid and others would make contracts and fund the program. 

 

4. Dr Manary put a PPB in to Sierra Leone in 2007 and Ghana in 2014 all sustainable and funded through the world health organization. Project Peanut Butter has run PPB program in Malawi, Sierra Leone and Ghana sustainably for all these years saving hundreds of thousands of children. However, nobody or organization would spend the money for startup or expansion in any of these needy countries. Therefore Dr. Manary had to develop his own funding.

 

5. Palm Springs Sunup Rotary Club got involved in 2010. First we did a small TRF (The Rotary Foundation) Matching Grant for a small program in an orphanage in the Philippines. Then we did an expansion TRF Global Grant for Malawi, then Sierra Leone and last year Ghana.

 

The Sierra Leone TRF Global 
Grant gave PPB the ability for PPB to do the proposed expansion of 50 clinics into an area where there are no clinics in Sierra Leone.