Voices of leadership
A Mother’s Mission to End Malnutrition: Navyn Salem’s Global Impact
Q&A with Navyn Salem
Navyn Salem has spent nearly two decades fighting an enemy that kills more children than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined: malnutrition. Her weapon? Peanut butter – or more precisely, the fortified therapeutic foods her organization Edesia produces for children in crisis around the world.
The journey began in Tanzania, where a visit to her father’s homeland exposed her to the devastating reality of malnutrition. She saw children her daughters’ age dying from something preventable. This pivotal moment was the first step in Navyn’s transformation into a social entrepreneur, springing to action and taking on the challenge of global malnutrition.
In 2007, she established a factory in Tanzania to produce Plumpy’Nut, the ready-to-use therapeutic food used to treat severe acute malnutrition. But she quickly realized the scale of the crisis demanded an even broader response. In 2009 Navyn set out to help end the crisis of global malnutrition by founding Edesia, a U.S. non-profit, social enterprise, with a mission to treat and prevent malnutrition in developing countries worldwide. Her factory in Rhode Island produces a range of fortified, peanut-based products like Plumpy’Nut (RUTF) and Nutributter (SQ-LNS) for international humanitarian agencies and NGOs working in emergency and conflict zones. Since 2010, Edesia has reached over 28 million children in 65 countries, including Sudan, Venezuela, Gaza and Guatemala.
Navyn is a Henry Crown Fellow, Class XVIII, and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. In 2022, she was awarded the John P. McNulty Prize for her bold leadership tackling a seemingly intractable problem. We caught up with her at the 2025 Resnick Aspen Action Forum to reflect on purpose, leadership, and the courage to use your voice to stand up to the unacceptable.
Answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What sparked your journey to address global malnutrition?
I started my journey 18 years ago for two reasons. One, my father is from Tanzania, as are my grandparents and great grandparents, and I have four daughters, all under the age of five at the time I started Edesia.
Tanzania is a country hit hard by malnutrition – 8,000 children die every day from something that’s 100% preventable. As a mother raising young children, this kept me up at night, and I knew that I had to do something about it.
What is your mission at Edesia?
Our mission is to treat and prevent malnutrition in the world’s most vulnerable children. We do that through the production of these fortified peanut butters that are used to treat the most severe cases of malnutrition.
Our main product is called Plumpy’Nut. And over eight weeks, we can fully rehabilitate a child from barely breathing, unable to sit up or even cry, to a healthy child who not only survives, but is building the brain capacity to thrive.
What keeps you going to pursue this mission?
There are many problems in the world that we cannot solve, and malnutrition is not one of them. It really just takes action and the will to continue this fight. We need to put all the pieces in place to make ending malnutrition possible.
What does moral courage mean to you?
Courage is finding your voice deep inside and then using it, even when the consequences are unknown. It’s understanding what happens if you don’t speak up versus what happens if you do. So many of us here [at the Action Forum] have a physical platform to stand on (Navyn motions to the stage she’s standing on). We have a voice that we can choose to use. And right now,, there’s a lot of fear of retribution, and a lot of people are being silenced. Now is the time to speak up even louder, to voice what we care about and the issues that we’re passionate about, because that is the only way that we can make change.
I’m committed to using my voice until we fulfill this mission of ending malnutrition worldwide. Being a leader entails making decisions that could be right or wrong and getting comfortable with making those decisions. Interestingly, what I’m often more afraid of is,”what if this idea works?” because success brings enormous responsibilities and opportunities you must follow through on.
What personal transformation did your leadership journey require?
I was the shyest child on planet Earth. One day I decided that I wanted to make a difference in the world. And the most scary part of that was getting on a stage for the first time and having to even utter a sentence. But overcoming that fear was the first step I had to take on in order to do the work I do now. And now you can’t get me to shut up or get away from this microphone. That was really a process and quite scary and difficult to go through.
About the Aspen Global Leadership Network
The Aspen Global Leadership Network (AGLN) is a dynamic, worldwide community of nearly 4,000 entrepreneurial leaders from over 60 countries. Spanning business, government, and the nonprofit sector, these leaders share a commitment to enlightened leadership and the drive to tackle the most pressing challenges of our times. Through transformative Fellowship programs and gatherings like the Resnick Aspen Action Forum, AGLN Fellows have the unique opportunity to connect, collaborate, and challenge each other to grow and commit to a lifelong journey of impact.
More from 2025 Resnick Aspen Action Forum
In July 2025, over 500 leaders across the Aspen Global Leadership Network (AGLN) community gathered for our largest Action Forum to date. Joined by nearly 100 young leaders, AGLN Fellows from more than 30 countries returned to the enduring questions first posed at at the founding of the Aspen Institute 75 years go: What does it mean to lead with purpose in times of profound uncertainty?
Explore more inspiring content on leadership and change-making from the 2025 Action Forum here.