Semilla Nueva

With support from the Elevate Prize, Semilla Nueva will publicly launch our scale plan. Within three years, our program will double the incomes of 40,000 farmers, improve the nutrition of 7.7 million people in Guatemala, and begin the process of expanding our seed sales to Sub-saharan Africa, where they will improve the nutrition of over 100 million people by 2030. 

More importantly than the funding, we plan to work closely with the Elevate Prize team to cast an international spotlight on the nexus of poverty, malnutrition, and new market-based, self-sustaining solutions. The topic of emigration from both Central America and Sub-Saharan Africa is at a critical point in much of the western world. We want to capture part of that narrative to show: 1) malnutrition is one of the structural causes of intergenerational poverty, 2) there are solutions to these problems that include using human-focused science, and 3) that individuals can make a difference. 

The Elevate Prize can provide funding to scale our approach and give us the platform to make an even bigger impact by scaling our story. 

When I was 18, I co-led a project to build a home for a widowed family in Central America. We did good, but I remained deeply uneasy. Could building homes actually end poverty? What would it take to make a real difference? 

At 21, inspired by the idea of the “social entrepreneur” I moved back to Guatemala with ideas to make a scalable, sustainable impact for thousands of the most excluded families: poor maize farmers. We started an NGO, built a network of supporting international scientists, and worked with farmers to test promising agricultural practices that had benefited millions of people in other countries. After six years, hundreds of nights sleeping in farmers’ homes, and over 500 test plots, we found a solution that could help farmers solve one of their biggest felt problems - lack of income - while also attacking one of Guatemala’s biggest structural barriers to overcoming poverty: malnutrition. 

Significantly improving  incomes of maize farmers and the nutrition of poor consumers had eluded the best organizations in Guatemala. I made the choice to invest at least ten years to build an organization that could  provide a  simple, plausible, inexpensive, scalable, and sustainable solution to the problem.  

Despite decades of interventions and trillions invested, malnutrition continues to undermine progress across all development indicators throughout the world. Globally, malnutrition contributes to 55% of childhood deaths and $3.5 trillion in economic losses annually. Malnutrition keeps countries impoverished through preventable deaths and economic losses.

In Guatemala alone, malnutrition costs $8.4 million daily through increased disease, educational delays, and lost productivity. Nearly a billion people consume maize daily across Africa and Central America. Countries with the highest rates of maize consumption are also the most malnourished because maize is unfortunately low in key nutrients. Overdependence on maize traps families in an intergenerational cycle of poverty.  

Semilla Nueva fights malnutrition with better, more nutritious maize. We produce and sell (non-GMO) maize seeds that produce grain with higher iron, zinc, and quality protein. Our affordable seed offers farmers competitive yields, improving their incomes and driving adoption through economic incentives. Farmers sell bigger harvests to market where it improves the nutrition of poor consumers without requiring any behavioural change. In 2020, our third year, our seed was used by nearly 10,000 families, who produced enough maize to improve the nutrition of over a quarter million people. 

By 2050, the number of people who eat nutritionally deficient maize three times a day will grow from 900 million to 2 billion,  threatening to greatly increase the number of malnourished children.  Traditional nutrition programs - like diet diversification and education - are costly and often fall short because they ignore the cultural importance of maize and economic realities of poor families. Diet diversification efforts like home gardens are very labor and land intensive and don’t produce enough to change nutritional outcomes. Nutrition education can be ineffective because nutritious foods are too costly, and poor families must focus on immediate needs and ensure they have enough calories to eat. 

By improving maize itself and using existing seed sales channels, we can rapidly reach poor families with better nutrition without changing culture. By ensuring the seed not only improves nutrition but also provides higher yields, we appeal to farmers’ economic needs, and the model's sustainability expands through market adoption. Our seed’s high-yielding quality makes it more competitive than previous, low-yielding biofortified seeds that failed to gain traction. Investing in biofortification is transformative because it is highly cost-effective; $1 generates $27 in economic return from averted disease, improved earnings, and increased productivity.

First, we’re franchising. Semilla Nueva took the lead selling high yielding, more nutritious maize seeds to farmers at low prices. Now we’re sharing our seeds and know-how with Guatemalan seed companies interested in expanding their sales. This approach expands our reach from 10,000 families in 2020 to 40,000 families in 2024. These families will produce more than 240 million lbs of more nutritious maize (4 billion nutritious tortillas), improving the nutrition of 7.7 million poor people in Guatemala. 

Second, we’ve built partnerships with leading global companies and experts to develop faster methods to develop even higher yielding, more nutritious seeds. 

Third, as Semilla Nueva scales in Guatemala, we will also take good conventional seeds from partner organizations in Sub-saharan Africa already working with hundreds of thousands of farmers, and convert them to also have higher levels of nutrition. This will allow Semilla Nueva and its partners to impact tens of millions of additional people without having to develop a new program in each country.