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Fighting World Hunger Through the Hunger Project

Fighting World Hunger Through the Hunger Project

Hunger affects more than 700 million people in the world. About one in nine people on this planet do not have the proper amount of food to sustain a healthy lifestyle. The majority of people suffering from starvation live in developing countries in Africa and parts of Asia.

Hunger also has a significant adverse impact on children. Poor nutrition causes about 45 percent of deaths in children under five. This amounts to approximately 3.1 million children each year. Sixty-six million young children attend school hungry, and 22 million of those children are from Africa. In developing countries, one out of three children are stunted, and at least 100 million of these children are underweight.

Malnutrition and world hunger are significant factors in poverty, but organizations such as the Hunger Project work to combat these factors.

 

What is the Hunger Project?

The Hunger Project was established in 1977, and its primary goal is to help everyone live a fulfilling and healthy life by ending world hunger.

The organization’s focus is world hunger, and it has pinpointed other variables that contribute to achieving its ultimate goal. Simultaneously, it works to enhance human dignity, gender equality, empowerment, interconnectedness, sustainability, social transformation and transformative leadership.

The Hunger Project faces each challenge with three approaches. Firstly, it works to empower women, because they are essential to decreasing world hunger. It then focuses on making dependent communities self-reliant through mobilization. Finally, it works to improve local governments through partnerships.

 

The Hunger Project Improving Ghana and Burkina Faso

Recently, the Hunger Project partnered with the Economic Community of West African States to work on projects in Ghana and Burkina Faso. Together, they will finance these projects to improve leadership in communities. With better guidance, the organizations hope that it will lead to people being able to obtain their basic daily needs.

Another goal of these projects is to teach communities how to create boreholes during harvest. Boreholes are holes that are drilled into a surface to extract vital material. Boreholes are useful for drilling for water, as well as oil and mineral extraction.

Finally, as part of the series of projects, the organizations will work to equip Ghana and Burkina Faso with more modern tools and skills.

 

The Hunger Project’s Maternal Care

Ghana’s maternal healthcare system is in dire need of improvement. As of 2010, 164 out of 100,000 births resulted in death. The Hunger Project is working to make a difference by partnering with the Ghana Health Service to teach women how to become midwives.

Ghana is suffering from a shortage of midwives, which can lead to complications during childbirth, especially when a trained attendant is not present. The organization strives to place trained midwives across 15 districts in Ghana. These midwives will offer 24-hour maternal care, especially in the regions that have a shortage.

Hunger is crippling a significant number of people in the world, but with organizations such as the Hunger Project working to address the causes, improvements are sure to come shortly.

– Cassidy Dyce

Photo: Flickr

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Three Nonprofits That Fight Hunger in Uganda


At least 1.3 million Ugandans face hunger following drought conditions and subsequent poor crop yields, according to a 2016 email statement from Christopher Kibazanga, Ugandan Minister of State for Agriculture. Among the harder hit were the citizens of the northeastern Karamoja region, with 65 percent of people having access to only half a meal or less per day.

Multiple nonprofits, however, have focused on eliminating Uganda food insecurity for decades and are still seeking long-term solutions to this crisis. Here are three nonprofit initiatives that are contributing to the fight against hunger in Uganda.

Hunger Project

Hunger Project has been working in Uganda since 1999, and utilizes an aid distribution method they refer to as an “epicenter strategy.” This method involves establishing community-built and community-facilitated mobilization centers that bring together multiple villages to share resources and address issues that affect all communities involved.

Over an eight-year timeframe, an epicenter addresses hunger and poverty while allowing communities to become sustainable and self-reliant, with the goal of being able to fund programs and activities without investor involvement.

Hunger Project has established 11 epicenters that serve 494 villages in total, reaching 287,807 people in all.

The World Food Programme

World Food Programme (WFP) is working with the Ugandan government, partners in the United Nations and nongovernment organizations to turn emergency responses to food insecurity into longer-term investments that seek to solve the root of the problems.

WFP supports approximately 70 percent of refugees in Uganda through monthly rations, cooked meals at transit centers and nutrition support for pregnant and nursing women and children aged between six months and five years.

This nonprofit program also organizes the distribution of 284 school meals to students in Karamoja. The meals include locally produced cereals, in hopes of facilitating local commerce.

Feed the Children

Since 2012, Feed the Children has provided health education to communities in northern Uganda. These services include school health programs that provide meals and vitamin supplements, as well as teaching teens about making good food choices, pregnancy and breastfeeding.

As of 2015, 274 children in early learning centers received meals through their schools, 118 children received vitamin A supplements and 302 children received deworming medicine.

Feed the Children also promotes community malnutrition detection education to increase the number of children that can access quality and timely treatment. This initiative advocates family health planning as a realistic and sustainable method to minimize hunger in Uganda.

– Casie Wilson

Photo: Flickr

Hunger in Mozambique

Mozambique HungerA country ravaged by war, Mozambique has many societal issues that need to be dealt with, and one of the stricken country’s biggest shortcomings is food. With 24.5 million inhabitants, one-third are chronically food-insecure with half of a million children ages six to 23 months being undernourished.

Underlying causes include inadequate nutritional intake due to poor diet diversity, low meal frequency, poor breastfeeding practices, high levels of disease and teenage pregnancy. The high incidence of HIV infection further aggravates the malnutrition that people suffer.

The U.N., the World Food Programme and The Hunger Project have all come together to help fight hunger in Mozambique. Mozambique is a “Delivering as One” country meaning that all U.N. agencies, if logistically capable, contribute toward a U.N. Development Assistance Framework. The UNDAF and the WFP have aligned priorities in Mozambique, and Mozambique is benefiting from it.

The WFP has two distinct programs that are set to run this year: the Country Program, or CP, and the Protracted Relief and Recovery Operation, or PRRO.

CP pursues the WFP’s transition from food aid to food assistance, supporting and enhancing government programs to constitute sustainable, national solutions to food insecurity through prevention, protection and promotion. The program attempts to stimulate local economies using innovative delivery methods of payment such as cash, vouchers and mobile phone transfers.

The five main components of the CP are school meals, social protection, nutrition, risk reduction and market access.

WFP’s other program dedicated to fighting hunger in Mozambique, PRRO, provides food assistance in support of response and early recovery activities, targeting the disaster-affected as well as displaced persons who have sought refuge in Mozambique. CP is a program centered on sustainability and growth while PRRO is centered on disaster relief due to the surrounding circumstances of the location of Mozambique. The key approaches of the PRRO are relief activities (sudden onset emergency), early recovery activities (post-relief assistance) and capacity development.

WFP and the U.N. aren’t the only ones that are fighting the hunger in Mozambique; The Hunger Project is also on the front line. THP works to build sustainable community-based programs using their Epicenter Strategy. An epicenter is a dynamic center of community mobilization and action, as well as an actual facility built by community members. Epicenters bring together 15,000-20,000 people from rural villages and give the groups a voice that has more influence than if they did not band together.

In Mozambique, there are three epicenters. These epicenters serve a population of about 22,200 partners in 10 villages. With the epicenters functioning at full capacity, the local areas will see an increase in economic sustainability and, therefore, more food security.

The U.N., the World Food Programme and The Hunger Project have all been aiding Mozambique for the past decade. Together these organizations have been providing beneficial practices spanning from immediate emergency relief to sustainability to community building programs.

– Erik Nelson

Sources: The Hunger Project, World Food Porgramme

Photo: Flickr

How to End Global Poverty Today

end_global_povertyCreating a community of advocates is essential to ending global poverty.

According to USAID, approximately 1.2 billion people around the world currently live in poverty. However, from 1990 to 2010, global poverty has been cut in half and continues to decline today. The ultimate goal in this fight against global poverty is to eradicate it until it is no longer part of the world.

Although ending global poverty is not an easy feat, it is possible. Providing impoverished countries with the necessary tools to create a self-reliant community is an essential step. Tools such as education, healthcare and water are important influences on poverty.

Building clinics, water sources such as wells and schools for education can reduce the economic instability that exists in impoverished countries. Workshops on effective farming methods and fundamental knowledge can influence the day to day lives of the poor. By providing these tools, people can begin to translate what they have learned into their livelihood, which will in turn break the cycle of poverty and create a community with economic security.

Answering the question of how to end global poverty then becomes a matter of how to obtain and provide these necessary tools. The answer: creating a community of advocates.

When people are aware, committed and active regarding an issue such a global poverty, change occurs.

One of the ways the public can contribute is by raising awareness in the local community. The more people who are aware of the cause, the higher the chance of impact.

People can use their power of speech and right to vote to make the efforts to end global poverty known. Calling or emailing senators and local representatives in support of poverty-reducing bills can influence the amount of help given to fight global poverty.

Donating money and volunteering time to organizations that aid in the fight is another way to effect change. The Hunger Project and The World Food Programme are examples of organizations that use unique and effective methods to act against poverty. Coming up with new and creative platforms that engages the community is also another method.

It’s not about how large the act, but about the amount of people who act alongside the cause. It can be a phone call in support of a bill or an open mic night performance to raise awareness. It can be as simple as investing or donating money to the cause or volunteering time with an organization. It can be using power of speech to raise awareness or using the freedom to vote in support of a bill.

It can be a large or small contribution, but it’s a contribution nonetheless. The goal of ending global poverty becomes reality when the community as a whole comes together to fight. It can make an impact, and it can move the cause forward until poverty is completely eradicated.

In the words of JFK, “One person can make a difference and every person should try.”

– Nada Sewidan

Sources: USAID,  The Borgen Project
Photo: Productive Flourishing