Creating new solutions to end hunger, for everyone, for good.
At Action Against Hunger, we develop better ways to predict, prevent, and treat hunger faster and more effectively. We have been at the forefront of global hunger research for 45 years, piloting new approaches and tools to improve children’s health and address the root causes of hunger.
In the 1980s, scientists at Action Against Hunger pioneered F100, the first therapeutic milk formula to treat severely malnourished children. Our formula is the basis for Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Foods (RUTF), a medicinal paste that combines key vitamins and minerals in easily-digestible, calorie-rich, and ready-to-eat packets. In the decades since these treatments were developed, the number of malnourished children around the world has been cut in half.
With our revolutionary treatment protocols and with careful monitoring, we can bring a child from a medical crisis to full health in as little as 45 days. A life can be saved for $150, and more than 90% of children who complete treatment are cured.
Still, more than two million children lose their fight against malnutrition each year. Every day, we challenge ourselves to create new tools and approaches to support communities in need, reach more people, and treat more malnourished children. We rigorously test our innovations and, when they prove effective, we scale up and share these solutions with others to save more lives and to end hunger, for everyone, for good.
Our SAM Photo App can screen children for malnutrition using photos taken from a smartphone camera by comparing the body shape of a child with severe acute malnutrition with that of a healthy child. By giving families and health workers a faster, more accurate diagnosis of a child’s nutrition status, the app helps them know when treatment is needed – before it is too late.
A MUAC (Mid-Upper Arm Circumference) band is a simple, color-coded measurement tool that is wrapped around a child’s mid-upper arm to indicate if they are healthy or malnourished.
Our Family MUAC approach teaches parents how to use the band to easily screen their children for malnutrition in their homes, instead of at a health center, saving them time and money.
This proven approach helps to increase early detection of malnourished children, minimize severe malnutrition cases, and empower parents to monitor their children’s health more easily and routinely.
As inflation and supply shortages make resources increasingly limited, we seek to find new ways to reach more children with treatment while saving on costs. In Ethiopia, Action Against Hunger is studying the effectiveness of treating malnourished children with reduced treatment doses.
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In Kenya’s drought-affected communities, Action Against Hunger installs Smart Taps - a water dispenser that uses a token system to provide clean water, functioning similarly to a user-friendly ATM. Families register with their local water management committee and receive tokens to access clean water at a low cost.
Action Against Hunger teaches refugee and host communities in Uganda how to use the Optimized Land Use Model (OLUM). OLUM is an innovative farming method that helps communities adapt to climate change and grow nutrient-rich crops by integrating climate-smart techniques.
To mitigate flooding in South Sudan, Action Against Hunger introduced lowland rice in flooded areas, a novel crop to the region. With this crop, farmers have an alternative source of food and income – because while the region’s staple crops can’t grow in flood waters, rice can.
In Zambia's Western Province, Action Against Hunger is working with farmers to plant, harvest, and sell drought-resistant black-eyed peas as part of our 10-year program to tackle hunger and build resilience through climate-smart agriculture.
In the Sahel region of West Africa, climate shocks make decent pasture harder to find. We created the Pastoral Early Warning System, an innovative system of real-time alerts that help herders find better grazing land by using satellite imagery combined with mobile surveys of people on the ground.
In countries impacted by climate and conflict shocks, our Modelling Early Risk Indicators to Anticipate Malnutrition (MERIAM) project helps researchers to better model the prediction and monitoring of undernutrition. The MERIAM model forecasts future malnutrition crises using computer programming and biology, earth science, and social and economic factors to improve anticipatory action and prevent the worst effects of impending hunger crises.
SMART+ is a first-of-its-kind technology developed by Action Against Hunger that promises to change the way the world approaches data on malnutrition. This innovative suite of open-source and secure information management tools is more effective, accurate and accessible.
Grounded in proven SMART methodology, it provides faster, more accurate mobile data that automatically includes time stamps and geolocations. It not only equips governments, humanitarian groups and donors with real-time insights, it holds the potential to aggregate the data at a global level, enabling trend analysis to identify precisely when and where intervention is needed, then working together to deliver it.
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