Fourteen years ago, a young nurse named Francis Asiku was riding his bicycle through northern Uganda’s Yumbe district when something changed his life, and possibly thousands of others’.
He had just come from treating a 4-year-old child suffering from acute malnutrition, a sight he described as disturbing. But it wasn’t what he saw in the clinic that sparked his next move, it was what he saw under a mango tree.
As he pedaled through the village of Midigo, he noticed birds pecking at ripe mangos that had fallen and were rotting on the ground.
Why, he wondered, were birds eating such nutritious fruit while local children went hungry? Why were mangos, sweet, vitamin-packed, and abundant, being wasted?
“It’s fulfilling to see my people smiling at the end of the day,” Asiku later shared. “Malnutrition is still there, but this does not mean that we should give up.”
That epiphany gave birth to the Mango Project, a local-led initiative committed to turning the region’s mango bounty into a tool for fighting childhood hunger.
Malnutrition remains a significant issue across Africa, and Uganda is no exception. According to the Christian Science Monitor, one-quarter of Ugandan children experience stunting, permanent physical and cognitive setbacks caused by chronic malnutrition.
Asiku realized medicine could only do so much. What children needed first was nourishment. “Should we wait for the government to come to our rescue, and yet the situation keeps getting worse?” he remembers asking his earliest colleagues.
So, he and the village elders got to work. They began slicing mangos from the two annual harvests and preserving them in jars of boiled water and a bit of sugar. Without refrigeration, communities were losing up to 40% of their mangos. But this simple method made the fruit shelf-stable for up to a year.
During the COVID-19 years alone, the Mango Project distributed more than 12,000 jars of preserved mango to health centers and refugee settlements.
One large mango might not be a superfood, but it punches above its weight: packed with vitamin C, potassium, folate, and more. Still, Asiku knew that mangos alone weren’t enough, lacking key nutrients like protein, iron, and zinc.
With a modest trickle of donations, he invested in a solar-powered food dryer to expand the project’s reach. Now, he also dries okra and eggplant, rich in vitamin K, magnesium, and other essential nutrients, to supplement children’s diets even further.
Today, Asiku has become a local hero for childhood nutrition. He tends to an orchard of 310 hybrid mango trees, carefully bred to resist fruit flies and unpredictable weather. He’s even working toward a government license to expand distribution across Uganda.
The Mango Project started with a simple idea: no child should go hungry when food is falling from the trees.
And now? It’s not just fruit that’s growing in Midigo, it’s hope.
