Hunger Blog

The Million Woman Milestone Achieved: What’s Ahead?

In the second installment of Chris Dunford’s monthly insights into the longstanding crisis that diminishes the lives of nearly a billion chronically hungry poor people, he observes how milestones are as much about the future as they are the past. The global crisis of food cost and availability is not going away soon; for the chronically hungry poor, it is a crushing reality that has no immediate solution and that heretofore did not have the perverse “benefit” of being portrayed as a crisis. How can Freedom from Hunger’s recent victory in surpassing the million-client threshold illuminate what must come next?

The Million Woman Milestone Achieved: What’s Ahead?

Early in 2008, we at Freedom from Hunger determined that we are directly serving more than one million women and that this milestone was achieved by doubling our outreach in just one year. This is not a cumulative figure for the total number of people reached since our founding in 1946-it is a snapshot of the number of current clients at the end of 2007.

Freedom from Hunger has made it possible for 240 partner organizations to offer over 1.16 million poor to very poor women and their families a combination of financial, education, and health protection services to support their self-help efforts, meaning that approximately 7.4 million people are currently affected by Freedom from Hunger’s innovation and training activities.

In this vast global view, our work is significant only if it creates a demonstration effect for the international development community, showing many, many others what can and should be done to support self-help efforts of the very poor. With what we have to offer, Freedom from Hunger has an obligation not just to demonstrate but also promote what we know will work for very large numbers of the very poor.

We are directly serving more than one million women and this milestone was achieved by doubling our outreach in just one year.

Promoting What Works

We can and should expand the frontiers of what is considered feasible and effective. This larger goal is even more relevant and urgent now, in light of the current world hunger crisis. Surges in prices of staple foods threaten to plunge an additional 100 million people into the ranks of the chronically hungry, the focus of our concern and our mission for many decades already.

We develop a wide array of innovative microfinance, education, and health protection products and services and then train local partners worldwide to adapt and distribute them. Our most effective products and services include Credit with Education, Microfinance and Health Protection, and the Global Financial Education Program (a joint venture with Microfinance Opportunities). In Ghana, we distribute our work through MicroBusiness for Health, in West Africa through Saving for Change (a joint venture with Oxfam America), and in India, Mexico, and West Africa through our Reach “capacity centers,” all of them exciting examples of our perpetual commitment to innovation to reach the chronically hungry rural poor.

The Significance of a Million

One million women is a major milestone. I am deeply optimistic about our prospects for continuing the aggressive growth that has marked Freedom from Hunger’s trajectory in the past three years; we are on track to meet or even exceed our original target of three million women by the end of June 2010.

How important is this? This achievement is, or soon will be, a very big deal for three million plus women and their families. But what is the significance of three million, or even 15 million (when we count the whole family), in light of the 800 million plus people who are so poor they are chronically hungry?

The standard responses of the international community to hunger are emergency food relief, government “safety nets” (various ways to provide welfare support), and investment in agricultural production and trade. Our experience tells us that these responses are only part of the solution.

Beyond Developing and Demonstrating

We have known for a long time that women and children, especially children under the age of five, are particularly vulnerable to malnutrition from chronic hunger. The global public health community knows exactly what needs to be added to emergency relief and safety net programs to save the lives of millions of children caught in a world hunger crisis-promotion of exclusive breastfeeding in the first six months of life, introduction of complementary foods at the right time and of the right type in the right way, knowledge of how to prevent or manage diarrheal disease, and immunization against common childhood diseases.

What have not been available are effective systems for delivering the information and promoting the behavior change needed to put this life-saving knowledge into large-scale effect. Freedom from Hunger has developed and demonstrated effective systems to do just that. We will do even more now to make these systems available to all providers of emergency food relief and social safety nets.

While Freedom from Hunger’s recent focus has not been on agricultural research and extension or on advocacy for policy change at the level of governments, corporations, and international bodies, we can and will support our colleague organizations that do have this experience. We will speak up more loudly to advocate for liberalization of international trade in agricultural commodities, to stimulate both competition to lower prices and research to increase food production, preferably with reduced dependence on fertilizers and pesticides and other inputs derived from increasingly pricey petrochemicals.

Freedom from Hunger’s core strategy, however, is built on our understanding that more than these traditional responses to hunger is desperately needed. The enormity of the number of chronically hungry people in the world is testimony to the need for something more, something else, something lasting. And that is Freedom from Hunger’s purpose: to find and show others the something more, something else, the something that creates lasting change. It is what we do.

Now is the time to show what needs to be and can be done to really address the root problems of people so poor they cannot buy enough or grow enough food to lead healthy, productive lives throughout the year.

Leading By Example

The world hunger crisis highlights the importance of our strategy and our day-to-day, year-to-year work. Rather than follow the lead of the rest of the development community, we must take the lead. Now is the time to show what needs to be and can be done to really address the root problems of people so poor they cannot buy enough or grow enough food to lead healthy, productive lives throughout the year. Now more than ever, our work can hasten the end, not overnight but soon, of poverty so desperate that nearly a billion people are chronically hungry.

Read past issues of Uncommon Sense in the archive.