IFANCA® and UNICEF USA team up to address health security

At IFANCA, our mission involves promoting food security, nutrition equity, and health security. Our organization was founded in 1982 to help companies meet the needs of halal consumers, and our core mission was, and continues to be, making halal accessible for everyone. This includes enabling access to halal products so that halal consumers can feel food and health secure while simultaneously preserving their core religious values.

At IFANCA, we want to increase access to nutritious food and critical pharmaceuticals for halal consumers around the world to ensure the future health security of the global population. Currently, the COVID-19 pandemic represents the biggest threat to the health of people worldwide, which is why we turned our attention to the global COVID-19 vaccination effort. We want to bring attention to the pressing health needs of the Muslim population, a task that requires us to look at the aggregate factors harming an individual’s wellbeing.

In the article “Covid-19 Vaccination Efforts in Muslim Nations Try to Overcome Halal Concerns” in the Wall Street Journal, Saeed Shah and Jon Emont note that a study of opinion on vaccines in 149 countries published in the Lancet medical journal in September 2020 demonstrated how vaccine hesitancy remains a serious issue in the Muslim world. According to the study, seven of the ten countries with the lowest trust in vaccines are Muslim-majority countries. Therefore, for us at IFANCA to live up to our mission of promoting health security among halal consumers, these findings mean that our role requires us to examine the reasons why some Muslims remain vaccine-hesitant.