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  A Healthy Handful: In Egypt, flour is fortified with essential micronutrients to help combat widespread anemia. Introduced in 2008 with support from WFP, GAIN and the Egyptian Ministry of Social Solidarity, the program adds iron and folic acid to baladi bread - the staple food of Egyptians.

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  A Simple Way To Improve Health: At Luxor Flour Mill in Luxor, Egypt, manager Boghdadi Salah Mohamed looks on as iron and folic acid are added to the flour through a filtering system. Iron is vital to cognitive development in children and folic acid can prevent neural tube defects among pregnant.

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  Test For Success: A lab test is conducted at the mill to ensure the fortification was successful. The red spot confirms the presence of iron in the flour.

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  From Mill to Bakery: After being packed and loaded on a truck, the flour is ready to be delivered to the bakery. Baladi bread is a commodity that many families in Egypt consume at all of their daily meals.

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  A Straightforward Bread-making Process: At El Beayrat bakery outside of Luxor, Egypt, half a sack of fortified flour is mixed with half a pack of yeast to create the bread dough.

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  Daily Bread, On A Grand Scale: A baker kneads the dough to create individual loaves. Over three thousand pieces of bread are produced at this bakery each morning.

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  An efficient process: A worker places the dough on a conveyer belt of a gas oven. The bread takes only five minutes to bake.

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  A Nutritious Handful: Fresh out of the oven, the bread is almost ready for sale. With 49 percent of the population surviving on the equivalent of just $2 a day, the bread is subsidized and sold for only 20 cents a stack.

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  Sorting the loaves: After cooling down, the bread is divided into stacks of twenty, the daily ration for a family.

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  Bread Line Forms Early: People start lining up more than an hour before the bakery opens in the morning. With a limited amount of bread available, the demand is high.

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  The crowd surges forward: Pandemonium ensues as the bakery opens for business.

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  A precious, scarce commodity: Parents struggle to get to the front of the line, but only the first 175 will receive their stack of bread. El Beayrat is the only bakery in the village that sells the fortified baladi bread.

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  Demand outstrips supply After just 20 minutes, the bakery sells out, leaving many without their daily bread.

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  Bread for the family: A boy happily carries his stack of baladi bread as he heads home to share it with his family. Over the past two decades, scientists and economists have come to see food fortification as one of the most cost effective ways to improve health outcomes at-scale.

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  A straightforward solution With more than 50 percent of children under 5 five in Egypt suffering from anemia, adding essential nutrients to daily food is a simple way to keep children and families healthy.

Gallery: Their Daily Bread

Improving health, one piece of bread at a time

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Millions of Egyptians suffer from poor nutrition, with side effects including birth defects and miscarriages. The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) started a program to fortify Baladi Bread – the staple food of Egypt’s poorest – with essential amino acids and vitamins that they weren’t getting.The results are impressive and one family’s newest member is living proof.

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