Hunger and malnutrition still persist at high levels. Welthungerhilfe (WHH) has a mandate to fight hunger an poverty and promotes a systems approach.
Food Security and Nutrition
The Challenge
Achieving a sustainable, healthy diet is crucial for the development and well-being of all people, particularly children and mothers. Nutrition lies at the heart of SDG 2, and access to adequate food is a fundamental human right. Yet hunger and malnutrition remains widespread. In 2022, 148 million children under five were stunted, 45 million were starved, and 37 million were overweight. Undernutrition contributes to nearly half of all deaths in children under five and leads to long-term physical and cognitive impairment, perpetuating poverty.
Micronutrient deficiencies, such as a lack of iron, zinc, and Vitamin A, are also a major public health issue. Climate change, inequality, conflict, and the COVID-19 pandemic have further worsened food insecurity and malnutrition. Addressing these challenges requires integrated, multi-sectoral approaches that target the root causes of malnutrition. WHH’s mandate is to fight hunger and poverty, promoting a systems approach to tackle this global issue.
WHH's Nutrition Portfolio in 2024
95
Projects with nutrition component
28
Countries
3M
People reached by projects
>500K
Participants in Nutrition Smart CommUNITY projects
Our Approach
WHH aims to transform food systems to always ensure healthy and sustainable diets for all. Our focus is on improving nutrition through a multi-faceted approach. We apply a nutrition lens to most projects, addressing the root causes of malnutrition within broader systems. This involves sectoral integration, collaborating across agriculture, WASH, health, livelihoods, gender equity and climate resilience to address malnutrition holistically.
Central to WHH’s strategy is the Nutrition Smart CommUNITY (NSC) approach, which has been refined over more than 10 years. As one of WHH’s largest project models, NSC integrates agriculture, nutrition, WASH, community empowerment, and gender activities for a catalytic effect. Working with local partners in rural areas, especially in regions severely impacted by malnutrition, NSC uses systemic measures at multiple levels to combat the root causes of hunger and malnutrition.
The NSC approach is built on four key strategies: promoting behavior change at the household level, strengthening community-based institutions, enhancing nutrition-related services, and advocating for a cross-sectoral, community-based model to implement the right to adequate food. By addressing both nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive issues, NSC fosters sustainable, long-term improvements in food and nutrition security.
WHH also emphasizes collaboration with stakeholders from public and private sectors at national and sub-national levels to enhance nutrition capacity and effectiveness. Through capacity sharing and the Contextual Analysis of Nutrition (CAN), WHH explores local nutrition practices and designs tailored interventions. This holistic, multi-sectoral approach enables WHH to combat malnutrition while promoting systemic, lasting change.
Systemic Outcomes
In 2024, WHH's 95 nutrition-related projects directly affected three million people. The Nutrition Smart CommUNITY multi-country project in Southeast Asia reached more than 500,000 people in 486 villages. This included 35,000 children aged 6 to 36 months. Over the course of the project, sanitation practices increased by 30 percentage points, diet diversity by women increased by 25 percentage points and significant improvements in crop diversity were reported – all at a relatively low cost of around USD 10 per household. Currently the approach has been scaled to four countries in Africa where similar achievements are expected.
In general, there has been considerable progress in the past two decades in improving nutrition indicators. This is particularly the case in South Asia and Africa South of the Sahara – regions with the highest hunger levels and also home to the largest share of the youth population. However, WHH’s Global Hunger Index (GHI) shows that little progress has been made in reducing hunger on a global scale since 2015 due to the challenges mentioned above.
WHH places the human right to food at the center of all its activities, emphasizing that emergency assistance and development programs are not acts of charity. States and the global community, including industrial nations like Germany, must take responsibility and invest seriously in achieving SDG2, Zero Hunger. WHH empowers people to claim their right to food, but without coordinated global efforts, unsatisfactory results nutrition security will persist, especially in the face of climate change.
