This song is taking rap music where it's never been before.

Some of Rwanda’s top Afro-pop, rap and R&B musicians made this music video, co-produced HarvestPlus (a World Vision partner) and the Rwanda Agriculture Board, but it’s not your ordinary rap song.

The video highlights the nutritional benefits of bio-fortified iron beans, which – like the song – are not ordinary. They contain 15 percent more iron and yield twice the harvest of regular beans. That’s good news in Rwanda, where almost 40 per cent of children do not have sufficient iron in their diets, which can lead to lowered resistance to disease, energy levels and even IQ and learning capacity.

Fortifying beans with iron is apparently the way to go, as the song boasts that in Rwanda, “a meal without beans is like a meal without food.” Plus, they’re allegedly “so tasty, you’ll be missing out if you don’t eat them.”

Rwanda was the first country in Africa to officially launch bio-fortified iron beans developed throughconventional breeding. HarvestPlus works with many partners, including World Vision, to promote iron beans in Rwanda. World Vision is implementing bio-fortified crops in more than 10 countries around the world, and a number of other countries are exploring the options of biofortification in their context.

They aren’t the most conventional muse for a rap song, but hey – if there were ever any beans worth spilling... it’d probably be these.

Check out more about how World Vision and Harvest Plus biofortification programmes are improving nutrition in Uganda and Mozambique, and learn about some of World Vision’s work to end hunger here.

*Adapted from an article by Loria Kulathungam of World Vision Canada that originally appeared here.

Contributed by Meredith Hastings.