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Sierra Leone Marktszene Sierra Leone market scene

Food Security and Nutrition

The Challenge

An estimated 735 million people globally cannot get enough to eat (WFP). Welthungerhilfe (WHH) works to combat the different forms of hunger people face. Chronic hunger is a long-term state of undernourishment, often caused by a lack of access to affordable and nutritious food. Hidden hunger relates to malnutrition – a long-term unbalanced diet leads to nutrient deficiencies, causing disease and disrupting childhood development. Acute hunger is an extreme form of hunger, often linked to famine-like conditions. Conflict, natural disasters and other crises reduce food security for people often already facing chronic hunger. Climate plays a role in all forms of hunger.

A WHH flagship program supports 670 village communities across Asia and Africa. See the linked page for details.

Our Approach 

WHH addresses the root causes of food and nutrition insecurity through a multisectoral approach that includes nutrition-sensitive and nutrition-specific activities, civil society development, and advocacy measures. We partner with various local, national, and international platforms, coordination mechanisms, and networks in the nutrition sector.  

WHH focuses on the first 1,000 days of life and improves maternal and child feeding practices, promoting healthy family diets. We improve availability and access to nutritious food, promote diet diversification, and collaborate with communities and schools to strengthen community-based institutions and advocate for a multisectoral implementation model. WHH integrates a "nutrition view" into all sector interventions, including agriculture, water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), and economic development. We also provide short-term humanitarian relief interventions to respond to acute crises and target vulnerable groups with nutrition supplementation. 

Our Impact 

Food access is a critical criterion of food security. Therefore, WHH tracks the impact of its projects by measuring the increase in households with access to sufficient food. At the last measurement, food sufficiency had increased by 29% in targeted households across 25 projects in 16 countries.   

WHH tracks its nutrition outcomes by counting the number of women of reproductive age consuming a diverse diet. On average, during projects in which we measured these outcomes, the share of women aged 15 to 49 who consumed a minimally diverse diet increased from 32.6 to 60.2% across 32 projects in 17 countries. 

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