MAY 2003

At the Cutting Edge of Global Issues

Hunger is a complex issue. As hungry people work to end their own hunger, they must overcome daunting challenges in health, education, food security, water and environmental sustainability, among others.

These issues are inextricably linked and cannot be solved in isolation.

As investors in The Hunger Project, we have the privilege of standing in solidarity with the people at the front lines of resolving these issues - issues critical not only to ending hunger, but to achieving a sustainable future for all humanity.

Education

More than 100 million primary-school-aged children in the developing world do not go to school, of whom 60 percent are girls. Education is at the heart of the process of providing hungry people with opportunity. The Hunger Project empowers local communities to make dramatic and innovative improvements in education.

• In Africa, we’ve mobilized people in 43 regions of six countries to build epicenters. Every epicenter provides primary education for girls and boys and functional literacy for adults, especially women. In the process of building the epicenters, villagers gain the influence to successfully convince government to provide and pay for teachers, literacy trainers and materials for their classrooms.
• In India, a top priority for elected women representatives (panchayat members) who participate in The Hunger Project’s Women’s Leadership Workshop is to improve the quality of village schools, and make it safer for girls to attend them.
• In Mexico, Hunger Project animators have built - in partnership with the local community - Centers for Integrated Expansion (Centro Expansión Integral, or CEI) to mobilize community members to take self-reliant action to improve their well-being. CEIs provide literacy training, among other services. Earlier this year, the Mexican government honored a CEI in the state of Zacatecas for running the best regional school for adult literacy.

Mexico

 

Health

Approximately one billion of the world’s poorest people have no access to primary health care. The usual explanation - that the least developed countries are too poor to provide it - is simplistic. When people are mobilized and empowered - as they are by The Hunger Project - they create ways to make health care affordable and available.

India

• In Burkina Faso, The Hunger Project has trained 120 midwives, who are now working in the epicenters to help women with safe births, family planning, child nutrition and hygiene. In addition, a special training is being carried out to educate government officials and villagers on HIV/AIDS prevention.
• In Mexico, Hunger Project animators have negotiated with the local Health Services Department to use their volunteer-built CEIs as distribution sites to give vitamins and minerals to malnourished children in the villages and surrounding areas.
• In Bangladesh, Hunger Project animators have conducted campaigns to raise awareness on health issues, specifically immunization coverage for children and prenatal care for mothers. They are also encouraging parents to provide children with vitamin A and de-worming medicine, and mobilizing local resources and savings to build 23 health clinics.
• In India, The Hunger Project mobilized villagers in Uttar Pradesh to build 40 health centers.

 

Food Security

Food security is defined as “access by all people at all times to the food needed for a healthy life.” Two billion people lack food security, and more than 800 million are chronically malnourished. In many areas where The Hunger Project works, food is scarce during some seasons each year, and people’s diets have overall nutritional deficiencies.

• In Malawi, during the recent drought and floods, no one at The Hunger Project’s epicenters went hungry. Each epicenter has a large community field, where villagers work together to produce diversified crops, such as maize, cassava, potatoes and other vegetables, using improved techniques and irrigation. The epicenters also carry out food processing and packaging of these crops for families. Surplus produce is stored in food banks to ensure food security for the villagers during times of scarcity.
• In Uganda, our work has resulted in a new district-wide food-security policy affecting more than 600,000 people. The policy is based on a pioneering strategy in which the epicenters combine a community garden and food bank, managed by the local people. After seeing the success of this strategy, government officials have promised to make it mandatory for all subcounties in the district to establish a locally managed food-security strategy.
• In Peru, The Hunger Project has produced specialized nutritional training for marginalized communities in the central Amazon. The training includes the causes of malnutrition, preparation of a balanced diet, the nutritional needs of infants, and the prevention and treatment of common health problems.

Uganda

 

Water

India

Of the 4.4 billion people living in developing countries, 60 percent lack basic sanitation and 33 percent do not have access to clean water. According to Fortune magazine, “Water promises to be to the twenty-first century what oil was to the twentieth century: the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations.”

Water lies at the heart of all development. Ending hunger sustainably will not be possible without the delivery of clean water to the 1.1 billion people who presently lack it.

• In Senegal, The Hunger Project launched a drip-irrigation pilot project using a desalinization process for salt water. This process enables our partners to produce food the entire year. With World Bank funding to women’s organizations and land donated by Hunger Project women, the project produced such dramatic results that now other villages want to participate.
• In India, elected women leaders created action plans in the Women’s Leadership workshop, which resulted in their acquiring the funds necessary to install water pumps, thus bringing clean drinking water to their villages.
• In Bangladesh, the international community built hundreds of thousands of tube wells for clean water, many of which have now been contaminated by naturally occurring arsenic leaking into the groundwater. In areas mobilized by The Hunger Project, animators have educated people about this issue and ensured that the government tests all tube wells for arsenic contamination. They are also teaching people simple, affordable techniques to make water arsenic-free.

 

Environment

Most hungry people work on the land. Thus, it is the hungry people of our world whose lives and livelihoods are most immediately dependent upon our natural environment.

At the same time, environmental problems cannot be solved without resolving the problem of hunger. If hungry people must eke out a living that damages fragile soil, or cut down scarce trees for firewood, or burn precious rain forests to create cropland, they will have no alternative but to do so.

• In Bangladesh, hundreds of thousands of malnourished children die due to water and air pollution. Hunger Project animators are mobilizing a nationwide movement to protect the environment. Through awareness-raising rallies, The Hunger Project has challenged the government to address the issue, to stop the hazardous use of polyethylene bags, and to take two-stroke engine vehicles - a main cause of air pollution - off the streets of the capital city, Dhaka.
• In Benin, the Wawata epicenter generates power from biogas produced from garbage, manure and sewage. The epicenter’s electricity now enables the women and men of nearby villages to participate in a literacy program and other trainings in the evening. This experiment will be replicated in the other six epicenters in Benin.

Bangladesh