A Glass of Milk to Address Child Malnutrition in Ethiopia

The School Enrichment and Livelihoods Accelerated through Milk (SELAM) project aims to establish a pilot school milk program to address child malnutrition and chronic food insecurity among children in three regions of Ethiopia.

Heidi Busse (School of Human Ecology) and Michel Wattiaux (Dairy Science) were awarded a UW Global Health Institute (GHI) seed grant for the “School Enrichment and Livelihoods Accelerated through Milk (SELAM)” project. This one-year planning grant aimed to improve child nutrition and educational attainment by building multi-sectoral and community engagement processes toward the collective goal of creating a sustainable school milk feeding program that can be scaled up to increase the number of schools reached.

Busse, Wattiaux, and colleagues are also looking for ways to increase milk quality and prevent foodborne illness from unsafe dairy products through development of food safety regulatory infrastructure, in partnership with Ethiopian government and academic institutions. To help advance solutions for how to best introduce safe, quality, and nutritious milk into Ethiopian school meals, Mestawet Taye, Director of the School of Livestock and Range Sciences at Hawassa University, visited UW-Madison in the fall of 2018, hosted by Busse through a GHI Visiting Scholar grant.

For more information on Michel Wattiaux’s work visit https://kb.wisc.edu/dairynutrient/