World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

Meet Molly! She’s 13 and she lives in a slum in Nairobi, Kenya. She’s one of the 20 million children around the world who get a nourishing meal at school thanks to WFP. School meals are helping millions of adolescent girls like Molly develop the physical and mental strength they need to pull themselves out of hunger and poverty.

Namuding, a young mother in the drought-hit Turkana region of northern Kenya, is fighting off malnutrition thanks to a nutrition programme supported by the EU. Last year’s drought in the Horn of Africa left many communities weakened, making women and children especially vulnerable.

After visiting a refugee camp in Somalia and a slum in the Kenyan capital, Curtis ‘50 Cent’ Jackson has reaffirmed his determination to help WFP fight hunger in the region. The music artist has already committed to provide a billion meals for the hungry.

What’s it like to grow up in the slums of Nairobi? In Spring 2011, WFP gave a small video camera to a 12-year-old girl named Molly and asked her to record scenes from her daily life. Over the next few weeks, we'll be sharing more of her videos which offer a window into one of the poorest places on earth. Welcome to Molly's World.

Communications Analyst, Mariko Hall, was in Nairobi recently as part of the flood of humanitarian workers arriving in the Horn of Africa to help with the hunger crisis. She was with WFP's crack emergency telecoms team FITTEST, which is always brought in to get vital communications systems in place fast. Sitting in a guest house where there's no power, she explains some of the challenges of setting up a COMCEN (Communications Centre) in emergency environments.

Thirty years ago, local customs meant Fatuma's mother was under pressure to pull her out of school. Without the food offered at school, it's likely she would have dropped out. But she didn't. She got an education and then decided to devote her life to helping other kids do the same.Today Fatuma is a key figure in WFP's operations to support refugees in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya.

Dorte Jessen, a Danish national, worked as WFP's emergency coordinator in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya for  two months recently. Since June, the camp has absorbed tens of thousands of new arrivals from famine-stricken Somalia. Dorte's diary gives a taste of what her days were made up of: not just food rations and aid shipments, but also royal visits and a race for flip-flops.

Want to understand how high food prices really are? And how they're affecting the world's poor? Take a look at this infographic, which also underlines how hikes in food prices mean the poorest families have to make painful savings in areas such as health and schooling for their children.

Wilson Ereng, a driver  for WFP in Kenya, went to school for the first time when his family’s livestock died and there was nothing to eat at home. The promise of WFP food kept him going to school for the next ten years and meant that he received an education. Here’s how he remembers those years.

WFP’s food for assets programme is increasing access to food among vulnerable host communities while helping nurture better relations between the locals and refugees in the Dadaab area.