Iodine deficiency
"It wasn't painful but it made me feel very uncomfortable socially, so I tended not to mix with other people" says Nura Hamid, a 40 year old mother of two living in Saltpond, a fishing town in Ghana's central region. Nura's lump was a symptom of goitre, one of a number of disorders caused by iodine deficiency. She is now fully recovered but her condition is by no means unusual.
According to UNICEF, 740 million people suffer from iodine deficiency and it is most acute in developing countries. "Iodine is a key micronutrient in the early stages of brain development, so children born to iodine-deficient mothers often have a lower IQ," explains Rosanna Agble, head of nutrition at Ghana Health Service. "This not only limits the child’s individual potential, it also has wider social and economic implications".
Encouraging people to use iodised salt
UNICEF believes the best way to prevent these disorders is to encourage people to use iodised salt – salt with iodine added to it. The challenge in Ghana, where much of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, is persuading people to switch to iodised salt when historically it has cost twice as much as raw, non-iodised salt.
Selling brands profitably to people with such low incomes at a price they can afford to pay represents a formidable challenge for 
Unilever. The company drew on its experience in India, where it had developed a low-cost iodised salt called Annapurna.
Unilever made this available in small sachet sizes at prices as low as 500 Ghanaian cedis (six US cents) a packet. Millions of people now have access to affordable iodised salt. Since its launch in 2000, Annapurna has helped to increase the use of iodised salt in Ghana from 28% of the population in 1998 to around 50% of the population in 2002. With UNICEF, we are now extending Annapurna into other African countries.
Read the full story by downloading the pdf in the links below.
Note: The pdf was written in 2004. For more information on our approach to tackling under-nutrition and our partnership with UNICEF, please see the Nutrition section of our online Sustainable Development Report 2007.
