WhootWhooot! It’s official: the Clinton Foundation, Kuli Kuli & SFA have announced their partnership on the Haiti Moringa Project! The partnership was kicked off by Chelsea Clinton (daughter of Bill and Hillary) in a meeting with some of our Haitian women Moringa farmers last week. 

Can I have a WhootWHOOOT! (Yes I can, I’m writing this after all ;-p).

But seriously, this is pretty exciting news! Think of it like this: a little over a year and a half ago I had never even heard of Moringa, one the world’s most nutritious greens. A few months later I decided to find out if I could set up a project in Haiti, seeing if we could somehow use this amazing tree to help reforest a country that is by now 98% deforested. I found an amazing project partner in the Haitian organization Smallholder Farmers Alliance (SFA) and got started with a market study to see if there would be potential to grow and export Moringa from Haiti to the international market.

And now, one year later, Chelsea Clinton visits our project and announces a formal partnership between the Clinton Foundation (as a donor) and the SFA on ‘my’ Moringa project. In the meantime we have also established a strong relationship with our first buyer, Kuli Kuli, an awesome US company that has pioneered some amazing Moringa products.

Cherry on the cake: together with KuliKuli we got world renowned Chef José Andrés to support a Moringa recipe competition to raise awareness about Moringa’s amazing properties. Get your chef hat on because the winner will win a trip to D.C. to dine at his new new restaurant, China Chilcano! Also, for the duration of the competition, 100% of the profits from Kuli Kuli Pure Moringa Powder online sales will go to support the SFA and our work with Moringa farmers in Haiti. So do some good right away and share this post with all your friends: they get a chance to win an awesome price with Chef Andrés and our farmers get to benefit too!

Apart from all this: holy crap, I knew this project had potential, but this is CRAZY!

So what does all of this mean? It means that what started as an idea I had a year ago has now properly transitioned into a project that addresses three critical issues in Haiti: improving nutrition, empowering women and expanding agricultural export. We’ve got plenty of work to do to make it happen, but with these kind of partners it is surely encouraging to keep going, whatever happens! More about that (the work we’re doing to make it happen) in a separate post. For now allow me to sit back for 5 seconds and rejoice this minor achievement.

Thanks for showing interest and Keep Growing!