Innovative solutions: How we can fight hunger worldwide

ARK – Ending Hunger through Local Vegetable Exchange Markets

The organisation  ARK has developed the 16-week Feed Back programme to end hunger in Philippine communities. Feed Back is a vegetable exchange for rural areas that are particularly hard hit by hunger and poverty, and aims to help local people become self-sufficient in a short period of time. To this end, the programme invites families to grow vegetables in their backyards and to exchange their harvest within the neighbourhood as well as to sell surplus yields to other communities. Overall, Feed Back not only provides healthier meals but also creates new local systems and foundations for food supply and new sources of income for farmers, fishermen and their families. Families of four can afford 3 nutritious and balanced meals a day with the programme. 19,000 families in the Philippines have already participated.

Sanku – Ending Child Malnutrition in Africa

The social organisation Sanku – Project Healthy Children from Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania has found a way for local grain mills in rural areas to enrich flour with essential vitamins and minerals without adding to their costs. Sanku is unique in that all large international programmes pursuing similar goals focus mainly on the large urban centres, but not on small villages. Sanku now reaches over 5 million people with its fortified flour and cooperates with almost one thousand small mills. By 2030, Sanku aims to reach up to 100 million people.

Solarbakery / YaBana Global Care – Bakery in a Solar Container

The organisation YaBana Global Care from Munich originally started with the construction of a tuition-free primary school in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The financing of the school, the educational programme and the supply of food for the students was made possible by an integrated bakery. In the meantime, the idea has been expanded in an interesting direction. Together with Africa GreenTec, the Solarbakery, a bakery powered by solar energy, was created. The first mobile, solar-powered and thus energy-autonomous bakery that can be used anywhere in the world. Two of these solar bakeries have since been installed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Further bakeries are currently in preparation in Paraguay, Senegal and Tanzania. The bakeries not only contribute to supplying the local population with food, but also create new jobs and thus additional opportunities.

Save the grain – Solar Dryer to Secure the Harvest

The project won the audience award of our GOOD Impact Challenge together with Enactus Germany in 2020 and has since then gained traction. Among other things, the young team was named the best student startup in Germany at the Enactus National Cup Germany 2023. With Save the Grain, the students from Cologne help villages in Togo to preserve their food using simple, smartly designed solar dryers and thus reduce enormous harvest losses. Three of the dryers have been built so far and they are showing first successes: The farmers’ income could be increased by about 60% due to the reduction of losses and the possibility to sell the goods when the demand is highest (usually not directly after the harvest, but rather later).

Conflictfood – Supporting People in Crisis Areas through Fair Trade

The Berlin-based start-up Conflictfood sources food from crisis and war zones, thus helping local people to continue farming even in difficult times and to obtain fair prices. Conflictfood works with the principle of direct trade. The products are not purchased through brokers, but directly with the local partners. Conflictfood specifically goes to regions that are cut off from trade, including Afghanistan, Palestine, Myanmar and Ukraine.

ChillChoc – Start-up with Know-how Transfer to Smallholders

The Stuttgart-based start-up ChillChoc not only sources sustainable cocoa from countries like Sri Lanka or Brazil, but also shares rare knowledge about sustainable soil cultivation in the tropics, thus contributing to sustainable agriculture. This is because the founders had previously founded a start-up for the production of terra preta, a soil improver based on biochar.

Health4Bees – Bees as Environmental Protectors

Bee mortality is one of the greatest threats to food security on earth. The start-up Health4Bees, developed at the Impact Factory in Duisburg, has come up with a completely new method to protect bee colonies. With the help of intelligent sensor technology, data on pollutant inputs are measured, which the bees themselves collect incidentally during their daily flights with pollen and nectar.

ShareTheMeal – Community Engagement for World Hunger Relief

This award-winning app allows each of us to donate a meal to people in need through the World Health Organisation, and do a good deed with just a few clicks. For just US$0.80 (about €0.75), a meal can be shared with someone in need. There are different Fundraising Goals to choose from and users are free to decide for which purpose they donate and how many meals. In this way, over 190,000,000 meals have already been provided.

Goal 2 – No Hunger