​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

Hackney council will take a walk on the wild side in battle towards obesity

Hackney has some great spots for kids to explore across the borough’s parks, canals, and woodland. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Nowadays young children commit a great deal of time sat in front of TVs, iPads and different other screens. All across the United kingdom children are paying also significantly time indoors and not acquiring ample workout, and the borough of Hackney is no different.

When the responsibility for public overall health moved back to local government last yr, so also did the occupation of reducing childhood weight problems. As most mothers and fathers will tell you simply telling children to do something doesn’t usually perform, so Hackney council determined to do things differently – we approached the issue of getting individuals match with a bit of entertaining alternatively.

Specialists operating in behaviour change have been attempting to deliver the “entertaining concept” to bear on public well being for a whilst. They’ve had some notable successes, like obtaining folks to get the stairs by turning them into giant piano keys, and encouraging recycling with a bottle financial institution arcade. Adopting the easy principle that people are a lot more likely to do one thing if it is enjoyable seems like an clear way to get children lively.

I wasn’t the most active youngster, but I had mother and father who had been constantly insisting that I received out and about, and each and every school vacation they would take me on a loved ones caravan journey to the Lake District.

My dad would consider every trick to get me to stop complaining about getting bored, but he did not require to following I received a guide known as Rocky Rambler’s Wild Walks. It was the first Lake District strolling manual that place children in charge. In it, each and every a hundred metres of a stroll resembled a square on a board game and there have been colourful characters, larger than life landmarks and riddles along the way. There was no stopping me after that – I finished every single walk in the book with no so much as a grumble.

This is why I have set out to bring wild walks to Hackney. In terms of locations for youngsters to discover on foot Hackney has some great spots. There is adequate green room across our 56 parks to fit 450 football pitches, as effectively as canals, rivers and woodland.

My very first call was to Rocky Rambler’s creator, Colin Shelbourn, who kindly gave his permission for us to adapt the format and give it some east London flavour. The rest of the task fell into location when I stumbled across a brilliant nearby social enterprise referred to as Outside Men and women, and its director Cath Prisk, who knew Hackney like the back of her hand. She researched and wrote up the walks, with the support of her canine Charlie.

There were 3 criteria for every route. It had to consider a modest child about an hour (so about 2km) it had to commence in a single of the areas in Hackney with the highest charges of childhood obesity and it had to consider adventurers previous other public amenities kids could use to get lively, this kind of as journey playgrounds and parks. There necessary to be toilets along the route, and it necessary to be of interest to grownups too, helping mums and dads get to know their local community greater.

Encouraging youngsters to use neighborhood green spaces to get healthy is specifically the type of undertaking that has been created achievable by generating public wellness a neighborhood government duty. In Hackney, the person in charge of parks and leisure is the same particular person whose work it is to get residents more healthy. Parks are 1 of every regional authority’s most essential assets – but the challenge is to get residents utilizing them. By encouraging our younger residents to get their parents on a walk, Hackney’s Wild Walks aim to do just that.

The walks are offered to read on the internet here.

Kathryn Scott is public health communications manager at London Borough of Hackney

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Hackney council will take a walk on the wild side in battle towards obesity