General Mills wins award for fight against hunger in Africa

Minneapolis-based General Mills won national recognition Friday for its work fighting hunger in Africa.

The US Agency for International Development presented its Global Citizenship Award to General Mills' non-profit Partners in Food Solutions.

Partners in Food Solutions uses hundreds of local volunteers to help small mills and food processors in the developing world improve their food quality and distribution networks.

Volunteers fight hunger in the short term while also teaching African companies how multinational supply chains work, General Mills' Dave Cummings said.

"What we are doing is taking that knowledge and transferring it to the receivers over there so that they have the capacity to solve their own problems," Cummings said. "So really at the end of the day it's all about knowledge transfer"

General Mills employees last year provided as many as 12,000 hours to fight hunger in several African countries, such as Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania and Kenya.