The grant supports Indigenous women-led food security in Chiapas and Oaxaca, Mexico.
We are proud to announce that The Hunger Project-Mexico has been selected to receive a grant from Citi Foundation’s first-ever Global Innovation Challenge. The Challenge supports community organizations around the world that are developing innovative solutions to improve food security. With this investment, women and men from three Indigenous communities in Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico will engage in a training process to build sustainable food security and financial health for themselves, their families and fellow community members in partnership with The Hunger Project.
“We are very grateful for Citi Foundation’s belief and investment in women’s economic autonomy. This is an opportunity for Indigenous women of southern Mexico to powerfully bring their vision and communitarian traditional practices to market and break the cycle of extreme poverty and malnourishment for themselves and their families.”
Montserrat Salazar Gamboa, Country Director of The Hunger Project-Mexico
The training process will include four parts:
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- A school for community-led development to strengthen local leadership capacity
- Entrepreneurial training for Indigenous women
- Tailored technical training in traditional totopos-making, mountain orchard and tilapia pond management
- Participatory monitoring and evaluation training
The results of this program will take on a life well beyond the years of the grant – bringing sustainable access to food, diversity of food, and increased household income to over 2,000 rural, Indigenous people, directly – and further to markets reaching over 3,000 people.
Citi Foundation’s Global Innovation Challenge is a new model to identify and provide philanthropic support to community organizations that are developing innovative solutions to social and economic challenges facing low-income communities. The inaugural Global Innovation Challenge is providing a total of $25 million to 50 community organizations working to improve food security and strengthen the financial health of low-income families and communities around the world.
The recipients of Citi Foundation’s Global Innovation Challenge were announced at the 2023 Global Citizen Festival by television personality, Padma Lakshmi. She was joined by Montserrat Salazar Gamboa and Candance Patel-Taylor, representatives from The Hunger Project and Concern Worldwide, respectively.
Our strategic plan for 2035 maps a strategic path to scaling up our alliances and impact to reach 4.7 million people in 999 municipalities across 26 states. Building Community Capacity in Mexico
The Hunger Project-Mexico has been working with people living with hunger and extreme poverty in Mexico to be key change agents since 2005. In equal partnership with rural indigenous communities, The Hunger Project-Mexico applies a holistic, integrated methodology of gender-focused, community-led development that strengthens each community’s capacity to be the author of its own development.
Through this work together, communities awaken to their human rights — as women, as indigenous peoples — then, identify their priorities, develop a collective vision, and take coordinated action to reach sustainable “self-reliance”– wherein they become authors of their own development. Communities shift their mindset from believing they have no rights to development or representation to realizing that they do in fact have rights and that they collectively have the material resources and the human capacity to begin the work of ending their own hunger.
To date, The Hunger Project-Mexico has worked with 22,793 indigenous partners in 25 work areas across 12 states. Our strategic plan for 2030 maps a strategic path to scaling up our alliances and impact to reach 4.7 million people in 999 municipalities across 26 states.
Photo credit: Mexico, 2022; Photo for The Hunger Project
