World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

Through its rural development programme in southern Mali, WFP’s food- for-work activities help fight hunger in a region where chronic malnutrition rates are amongst the highest in the country. 

As schools reopen in the conflict-affected region of Timbuktu in northern Mali, WFP is providing children in 300 schools with two meals a day. This emergency school feeding programme has seen an increase in attendance, especially for girls. 

This year the rainy season in Mali has started late which may affect the harvest. Mali is just emerging from the 2011 food crisis and last year’s conflict which displaced many hundreds of thousands. The WFP is assisting the farmers in Segou, some 200 kilometres northeast of the capital, Bamako.

The conflict in Mali has displaced more than 330,000 people and put huge pressure on vulnerable host communities. Having provided basic food commodities to the populations affected by both conflict and a food crisis, WFP is now entering a new phase of its assistance by providing financial support. 

Through this initiative, it is expected that farmers’ organizations will have improved access to reliable and sustainable markets which could ultimately help them to increase their productivity and income.

A year of conflict in the West African nation of Mali has brought hunger to hundreds of thousands of people. Drought and endemic poverty have also taken their toll. Here are 8 things to know about hunger in Mali and what WFP is doing to deliver food and hope to the people who live there.

After fleeing her home in Mali, Dizawahet, 23, is about to give birth to her third child at a refugee camp in Burkina Faso. That's where she was born as well during another conflict in Mali that drove her parents across the same border. Dizawahet says she's grateful for the help families like hers receive at the camp, but that what she really wants is to go home.

As the fighting escalates in Mali, thousands of people forced from their homes are struggling to survive in other parts of the country. Aissata Walet is one of them. Forced to rent a hut in Bamako which she shares with 30 other people, Aissata say she doesn’t know how she’d feed her children without assistance from WFP.

As families in the Sahel struggle to recover from this year’s hunger crisis, tens of millions of locusts threaten to swarm across the region devouring the new harvest. To ensure that doesn’t happen, WFP has airlifted insecticide to Mali and Chad in a joint operation with its sister agency, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.