Our Recommendation
We highly recommend Semilla Nueva for support because they consistently measure appropriate outcomes and impact to understand if their work is successful. This page on their website describes a recent impact study.
New Incentives meets the requirements for 4 of our 4 key criteria:
✔ Understand the Social Issue
✔ Ultimate Outcome Goals (Life Changes)
✔ Evidence of Success
✔ Counterfactual Impact
Their Vision
Semilla Nueva fights malnutrition and poverty with better corn.
The Problem
Malnutrition is the biggest global contributor to childhood death. It is one of the world’s most serious but least-addressed development challenges. Its human and economic costs disproportionately affect the poor, women, and children, causing irreversible damage to cognitive development and lifelong consequences. In Guatemala, malnutrition costs over 9% of GDP in health expenses and lost productivity.
Although malnutrition rates are decreasing globally, the number of malnourished children is still increasing in regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, where corn consumption is high. Unfortunately, while corn has a low nutritional value, it is a cheap and productive crop and the foundation of hundreds or thousands of years of culture.
The Solution
Semilla Nueva works at the intersection of agriculture and nutrition to fight malnutrition from the ground up—starting with a better seed.
Its approach centers on biofortified corn: naturally bred to contain higher levels of zinc, iron, and protein. By distributing these seeds to local farmers, Semilla Nueva enables families to grow, eat, and sell more nutritious food—without changing their diets or behaviors.
They work with partners to develop biofortified corn seeds that have been naturally bred to have higher levels of nutrients. Their biofortified corn contains higher levels of the most important nutrients missing in the diet: 39% more zinc, 19% more iron, and between 30-80% more lysine and tryptophan (protein quality) than normal corn.
Key elements of the model include:
- High-nutrient corn seed production and distribution through local farmer networks
- Farmer training and technical assistance to improve crop adoption and yield
- Partnerships with government agencies to influence national seed systems
- Market-based pricing to make seeds affordable and scalable
- Evidence-based monitoring to track health and income outcomes
A Sample of Their Outputs
- 800,000 people reached through biofortified corn adoption
- Up to 80% increase in zinc and protein intake for consuming families
- Over 24,000 farming families equipped with high-yielding, nutritious seeds
- 18% average increase in crop productivity
- $1.59 per person average cost to deliver improved nutrition
A Sample of Their Outcomes
- Eliminate zinc deficiencies for women and children in rural, maize-growing families.
- Cut iron deficiency by 50% for children and 100% for women.
A Sample of Their Impact
- In contexts like theirs in Guatemala, biofortified corn can translate to a 20% reduction in stunted children, or more.
- An older meta-analysis of community-based studies on quality protein maize (QPM) indicated that consumption of QPM instead of conventional maize leads to a 12% (95% CI: 7–18%) increase in the rate of growth in weight and a 9% (95% CI: 6–15%) increase in the rate of growth in height in infants and young children with mild to moderate undernutrition from populations in which maize is the major staple food.
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