World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

Through an innovative cash transfer scheme, WFP is using mobile phones to transfer money in a fast and timely way to those needing assistance in Kenya.

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.

In Kenya, Purchase for Progress helps farmers living with HIV/AIDS sell their harvest to the World Food Programme.

In Kenya, Purchase for Progress began as a pilot project in 2009. WFP aims to work with approximately 10,000 farmers by the end of 2013.
 

WFP is working with communities on a variety of asset-creation projects - rainwater harvesting for human and livestock use, soil and water conservation, rehabilitation of degraded land and the production of drought-tolerant crops. These assets and the development of related skills enable communities to improve their resilience and increase food sufficiency.

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.

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.