Jacques, Marcel, David and their colleagues — five young agronomists from Rwanda — stood in awe in front of a primitive contraption on the floor of the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium, a well-known high school in north Tel Aviv. It was a kind of wooden cabinet with dangling plastic soft-drink bottles bubbling with green liquid inside. This liquid is the news they will bring back to their country, where malnutrition is rampant. It's spirulina algae, a superfood that contains all the essential nutrients a human body requires. 

The agronomists, all in their 20s, arrived for a one-year visit to Israel to study various aspects of Israeli agriculture and experience them firsthand. But according to Jacques Tuyishime, who lives in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, the days they've spent learning how to grow spirulina have been the most significant for them, even though this topic was not part of their original curriculum. “We learned how to grow fruits, vegetables and flowers, but that won’t do us much good. The project of growing spirulina will help us address an acute problem in our country. The government is building centers where children are being fed because they don’t get adequate nutrition at home,” he explained.

In Rwanda, about 45% of the population lives below the poverty line, and the development of 44% of children under the age of 5 has been hampered by malnutrition.

The spirulina project is overseen by a group of dedicated students at the north Tel Aviv high school. About three years ago, during a philosophy class with the school’s headmaster, Zeev Degani, there was a discussion about world hunger. In its wake, the students decided to look for solutions that would allow them — fortunate students from Tel Aviv — to help their peers who suffer from hunger and malnutrition. In the course of their research, the students were exposed to a variety of algae until they zoomed in on spirulina.