World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

Markos and Elias have received school meals from WFP for the past two years, but the lunch they ate one day in November was special. For the first time ever, the students enjoyed a meal made from crops grown just a few kilometers from their school — purchased by WFP directly from Ethiopian farmers.

Last year, WFP introduced vouchers into its urban HIV/AIDS programme in Ethiopia on a pilot basis, in place of traditional food assistance. People benefiting from the project can redeem vouchers for locally produced food. It’s just one part of a programme that helps people living with HIV and AIDS to get back on their feet. 

 After five years in the MERET programme, Hagdu doesn't need to walk for days to cut trees anymore; his land is preserved, and his family has enough to eat.

Jacob fled his home in South Sudan as a child and ended up in a refugee camp in Ethiopia. In the camp he remembers receiving WFP food assistance and realised its importance. He is now living in Canada, where he has established a charity through which he hopes to build schools in his native land.

With the help of WFP's food support and livelihood assistance programmes, Belaynish Dabe and her HIV-positive husband no longer struggle to feed themselves and their children.  WFP's food support to people living with HIV helps ameliorate the double burden of lack of income and deteriorating health. 

Risk management is high on the agenda of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition launched by G8 leaders in May 2012. It’s part of a paradigm shift from managing disasters to managing risks, which is central to the New Alliance’s commitment to achieve sustained and inclusive agricultural growth, reduce poverty, and improve food security in Africa. Mathewos Hunde, a leading Ethiopian expert in the field, tells us how risks are being managed in his country.

After years of hardship, a community in northern Ethiopia has found the route to a sustainable future through an innovative project which has helped to transform degraded hillsides into productive farmland. For its role in the project, the village of Abraha Atsbeha received official recognition at Rio+20 during an awards ceremony hosted by the UN Development Programme.

Fleeing conflict and drought in their native Somalia, Talata and her family undertook a slow and dangerous journey to Ethiopia in search of refuge. Ethiopia, itself reeling from a severe drought, is often seen as a safe haven by refugees fleeing conflict in Somalia, Sudan, and Eritrea.

Sindayo Tsegay sees herself first and foremost as a mother, a role which brings daily challenges. For Sindayo, who lives in northern Ethiopia, those challenges used to seem insurmountable before a tree-planting project changed her life as well as the lives of neighboring families.

Dadij and Senite live in the Doba Region in Eastern Ethiopia, about 20 km apart from each other. The key difference between them is that Dadji has been taking part in a land rehabilitation project and Senite has not. This meant that their experience of this year's drought in the Horn of Africa was quite different.