Squeezing Seeds to Combat Malnutrition and Poverty.

Missionaries from Marino Village, an agriculturally-minded group of children’s homes in Tanzania, visited SonSet Solutions (where we work on loan from MissionGO) and expressed a need for a moringa seed oil extractor. Moringa is, by far, one of my most favorite plants – it’s incredibly nutritious and flourishes in the difficult growing conditions found in much of the developing world. Moringa leaves can be consumed raw or cooked to provide a nutritional punch (we do the latter in our neighborhood feeding program in Congo) or steeped to make a tea with many health benefits. The seeds from moringa are also very nutritious, containing a high amount of monounsaturated fat and fat soluble micronutrients; however, the seeds are notoriously hard and the oil is difficult to extract.

These missionaries from Tanzania have a small, cumbersome, hand-crank oil extractor that they currently use to press the seeds and obtain the nourishing moringa oil, but they were hoping our missionary engineers could develop something that they could use to extract oil on a larger scale – not only to provide the children in the orphanage with additional nourishment, but also to sell at the market to create income for the orphanage and micro-enterprise opportunities for children aging out of their program.  

Our engineers did not disappoint.