​Not just for Hackney hipsters: the Kenyan sourdough bakery ​tackling blindness

One is a hipster meeting place in the middle of east London, the other overlooks the Menengai crater in Kenya and is staffed by orphans. But these two bakeries, E5 Bakehouse and Ujima Bakehouse, seemingly worlds apart, have come together over a sourdough starter and a shared passion for healthy bread.

Situated in the Nakuru region, a four-hour drive from the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, Ujima is the brainchild of Andrew and Madeline Bastawrous, British doctors who were overwhelmed by the demand for eye operations to treat blindness in the region and wanted to find a sustainable way to fund them.

Madeleine Bastawrous, a keen baker who trained at E5 in Hackney, had the idea to sell bread to support checkups for the patients, provide local employment and extol the virtues of healthy eating.

The couple had noticed rising rates of diabetes – which can cause blindness – and high blood pressure, which made them determined that the bakery would make and sell a healthy product. They turned to sourdough.

Sourdough loaves, popular among British foodies, contain no fat, oil or sugar, unlike many mass-produced breads. Also, making sourdough requires a period of fermentation before baking, which is said to make the bread healthier and easier to digest.

The couple asked E5 to provide strategic guidance and the Kenya-based Ujima Foundation, which trains orphans for employment, to provide the staff.

The story of head baker Jastan Kimani is typical of those supported by the foundation. He was orphaned at an early age and left with the responsibility of supporting nine siblings.

Rising star: head baker Jastan Kimani. Photograph: Andrew Bastawrous/Ujima Bakehouse

After discovering a flair for kneading, Kimani became the site’s master baker. He was recently invited to carry the flame, in the form of a sourdough starter, to Rio as part of an initiative to teach cooking skills and feed people for free during the Olympic Games.

Acclaimed chefs David Hertz and Massimo Bottura, whose social kitchens have previously attracted some of the world’s best chefs to Brazil’s favelas, or slums, invited Kimani after being inspired by the story of the bakery. He is due to travel at the end of the week.

Social enterprise

Profits from the Kenyan bakery are divided between the local eye hospital and the foundation. Some of those involved, such as Kimani, work at the bakery, while others work in hotels and shops nearby.

According to Andrew Bastawrous, eight out of 10 people who go blind do so due to entirely preventable causes. In Kenya, the biggest problem is a lack of access to treatment.

“The figures would be the same in the UK if you removed 99% of eye care,” adds the doctor, who also invented Peek, a smartphone app that offers a low-cost alternative for detecting vision problems.

Since the Kenyan bakery opened, the Bastawrouses have raised enough money to restore the sight of 60 people – a figure they hope will increase if they can start selling more bread.

They have also raised enough for 60 orphans to take a six-month employment-training programme through the foundation, which says it has an 80% success rate in getting its trainees placed in full-time employment.

The journey of the starter

The founder of E5 Bakehouse, Ben Mackinnon, has made three trips to Kenya – one with E5’s 200-year-old starter yeast – to support the bakery.

There was almost a disaster when air pressure on the plane forced open the jar carrying the starter – a fermented mixture of water and wild yeast that is used to help the bread rise. Almost all of it escaped, “but there was enough left in the pot to get going. They are remarkably resilient cultures”, Mackinnon says.

Related: How to make sourdough bread starter | Make your own

Mackinnon says that Ujima’s bakes easily passed the taste test. “There is a farmer a few miles from the bakery growing wheat and milling it in an Austrian stone mill, which is almost identical to ours here at E5,” he added.

Ujima has to use a special technique for “proving” the dough – letting it rest so the yeast can make it rise – to help preserve the loaves in Kenya’s heat, but otherwise the bread-making process is the same.

Back in the UK, E5’s special loaf is the ”Hackney Wild”. In Kenya, it’s the Afya, which is Swahili for healthy. The team are encouraged to promote the health benefits of sourdough to their customers.

Some of the customers have taken a bit of time to adjust to the taste, which is very different from the processed white loaves available on the supermarket shelves, said Andrew Bastawrous.

The average loaf at E5 costs between £3.50 and £5, and Ujima’s loaves are also at the higher end of their market, priced at about 200 Kenyan shillings (£1.50). “We are targeting people with a disposable income … like Robin Hood without actually stealing,” he says.

Next, the bakery wants to tackle diseases such as diabetes by creating an affordable product that can be sold by street vendors.

​Not just for Hackney hipsters: the Kenyan sourdough bakery ​tackling blindness

Kenyan ladies get cervical cancer vaccine but women"s wait for treatment goes on | Jessica Hatcher

Schoolgirls in Kitui, eastern Kenya, watch a friend acquiring an injection after they have been vaccinated against cervical cancer. Photograph: Karel Prinsloo/Gavi

Existence is rough for girls with cervical cancer in Kenya. Some of these attending the country’s only public therapy facility rest on benches and concrete floors outside the hospital to save funds for their treatment method. Other folks by no means make it to the capital for assistance because they can not afford the bus journey. Now, a vaccination programme has been rolled out, supplying hope for future generations.

“Cervical cancer vaccine now offered for girls in major school free of charge!” reads the turquoise poster outdoors the office of Christina Mavindu, senior nursing officer at the Kitui district hospital. Mavindu is two-thirds of the way via implementing Kenya’s initial public cervical cancer vaccination campaign in Kitui county. The third and last jabs will be administered in the following couple of weeks.

The campaign has been difficult. The amount of children wanting the vaccine has exceeded the doses obtainable and, at a price of far more than $ 50 (£30) per vaccine, many people have been unable to pay for it privately. “It need to be for everybody,” says Mavindu. Gavi (International Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation) supported the trial to enable Kenya to demonstrate that it has the needed infrastructure and capability to vaccinate 9- to 13-12 months-olds on a nationwide scale.

Vaccination is needed urgently cervical cancer is a developing lead to of morbidity amongst girls in Africa, and a rising concern. The condition is virtually six occasions much more prevalent in Kenya than in western Europe, according to WHO information. It is also the cancer that kills most ladies in Kenya, whose neighbour Rwanda became the initial lower-earnings African country to attain nationwide accessibility to the vaccine.

The remedy for cervical cancer is inadequate: almost half of the women who have been getting taken care of in Kenya “disappeared” from their programmes, according to the outcomes of a latest survey published in the journal Plos One particular of sufferers at the only public cancer therapy centre. “Most likely they could not afford remedy,” says Dr Ian Hampson, head of gynaecological oncology at the University of Manchester, who oversaw the investigation. Just seven% of women obtained “optimum treatment method”, even though 41% dropped out.

From screening to diagnosis and treatment method, ideal practice in Kenya is impeded at each and every stage. Beatrice Ngomo, a nurse in Kitui district hospital’s maternal and little one wellness clinic, has a difficult time persuading girls to get screened. Several can not afford health care care so do not want to know if they are unwell, she explains. Others do not like invasive procedures, she says, and are scared.

Even when a female starts encountering signs, she will often not look for treatment, Ngomo explains. Some females believe cervical cancer is a outcome of witchcraft so they desire to see conventional healthcare practitioners. “They shed a great deal of time whilst they’re carrying out that,” Ngomo says. Or they go to witchdoctors due to the fact they are more cost-effective than contemporary health care care. As a result, 80% of circumstances at the hospital are late stage cancer, in accordance to doctors’ estimates.

Ngomo has diagnosed two girls with cervical cancer this yr. She recalls that at first the females assumed that the cancer would kill them. Ngomo advised them that treatment method was poshsible and referred them to the Kenyatta nationwide hospital in Nairobi. “But there the troubles really commence,” she says. In Kitui, most people are farmers and the common everyday wage is less than $ two. Girls cannot afford to travel to the capital, allow alone get substantial-price medicines, she adds. At times they reappear at the hospital in Kitui months after referral, possessing in no way made it to Nairobi.

The subsequent difficulty is that the waiting time for a 1st appointment at Kenyatta nationwide hospital can be up to 6 months, according to Dr Orora Maranga, who performed the Manchester research and is now practising in Kenya. “The cancer is not waiting,” he says. In six months, it can grow from stage two to stage 4, dramatically decreasing the likelihood of survival.

When sufferers receive an appointment, they are faced with the expenses of treatment method. Elizabeth Mumbua Njeru, 35, sits on a stage outdoors the casualty ward hugging her handbag to her chest. Njeru has a cancerous tumour in her cervix and is two months into a course of radiation and chemotherapy. Njeru, from Embu, 120km to the north, is unable to afford accommodation in the capital. She has been a resident of the casualty ward for two months and is occasionally forced to rest on this outside. But she is established not to turn into yet another girls who “disappears”.

Her malnourished physique is struggling to cope with the treatment regime. Her nails have turned brown, she suffers from nausea and diarrhoea, and her immune program has been severely compromised by day-to-day injections of cytotoxins. Njeru is aware of the emergency department is no place for her it is a hub of infectious diseases which she may catch at any minute. But she has no selection.

Maranga’s review found that just 7% of patients at Kenyatta nationwide hospital had been getting optimum remedy. But it is not just the price that prevents them getting the right remedy. The hospital lacks one essential piece of equipment: the brachytherapy machine.

As Njeru sits in the hospital canteen enjoying a uncommon plate of fried chicken, she is joined by her pal, Rhonda Waeni Ndundua, who also has cervical cancer. Ndundua has also spent two months sleeping rough in the hospital grounds. Rhonda has received excellent news – she has been discharged. Scribbled on her patient information was 1 word: “brachytherapy”. Rhonda is free of charge to go house, but has to return to see the medical doctor in two months. Then, she will be informed that she requirements to have brachytherapy, radiotherapy delivered internally, in buy to acquire the advised therapy.

Hampson describes Kenyatta nationwide hospital’s brachytherapy unit as having been “in a state of disrepair for a number of many years”. Sufferers like Ndundua must travel to both Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania, or to Kampala in Uganda. There, they spend 30,000 Kenyan shillings ($ 360) for the brachytherapy food, accommodation and transport are added.

This may go some way towards explaining why just seven% of females in the Manchester research obtained optimal treatment. Hampson suggests there is no cash, and consequently no political will from the government to restore the brachytherapy machine.

Kenyan ladies get cervical cancer vaccine but women"s wait for treatment goes on | Jessica Hatcher