Researchers and innovators across the world are creating new inventions that help people in poverty meet their needs for adequate nutrition and medical care. Here are five inventions that are helping those in need.

5 Inventions That Help People in Poverty

1. The Lucky Iron Fish: The Lucky Iron Fish is a small cooking tool that aims to conquer iron deficiency in marginalized communities. Iron deficiency impacts over 2 billion people globally, making it the most widespread nutritional disorder around the world. People affected by iron deficiency may experience negative impacts on their energy levels, concentration, memory and cognitive development. Iron deficiency affects women more than men, and it is especially common during pregnancy. Users just add the Lucky Iron Fish to boiling water so that it can enrich their liquid or vegetables with iron.
2. 3-D Food Printing: Food printing is relatively new among inventions that help people in poverty. Nevertheless, 3-D food printing can create a stable food source for impoverished areas. This innovation can also address malnutrition through custom features that allow creators to set standards for nutritional additions. Additionally, 3-D printing may be a solution to food scarcity when a country is dealing with a natural disaster. While bringing all of these benefits to impoverished areas, food printers also produce less waste than traditional methods of food production.
3. Feedie: People around the world already love to snap pictures of their delicious meals before posting them onto their social media. Feedie is an app that allows users to help feed people around the world by just taking a picture of their meal. Each picture turns into a donation to The Lunchbox Fund. This donation will go toward producing meals for people in poverty all around the world.
4. Golden Rice: Vitamin A deficiency is a serious public health issue due to its severe impact on children around the world. This deficiency is responsible for over 500,000 cases of irreversible blindness in children under the age of five. Invented to solve this problem, Golden Rice is a new type of rice that has been genetically modified to contain three new genes that help create provitamin A. Many countries rely on rice as a food source, which means that switching to Golden Rice will not be a drastic diet change. In 2019, the Filipino government became the first among developing countries to allow Golden Rice for direct use among citizens.
5. Growing Shoes: Many children in poverty around the world are at risk for soil-transmitted diseases and parasites if they cannot afford a suitable pair of shoes. Growing Shoes is a durable shoe that expands in several places, which allows children to adjust the size as their feet continue to grow. In all, the shoe can grow up to five sizes. These shoes therefore provide a long-term solution to protecting children in poverty from dangerous environmental factors, like disease.

People around the world are creating new inventions that help people in poverty and those experiencing hunger. These small inventions help an entire community with just one iron fish, grain of rice or growing shoe at a time.

– Jacey Reece
Photo: Flickr