This paper is presented as an accompaniment to the World Food Programme’s (WFP) engagement at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences workshop Food and Humanitarian Crises: Science and Policies for Prevention and Mitigation (took place 9-10 May 2023). The subject matter examined here is the role of innovative actions in addressing humanitarian and food crises at scale.
The paper offers a series of insights into the state of global food security; WFP’s overarching response through which it responds to, reduces and shifts needs; and how WFP has developed, applied and mainstreamed innovation into its programmes.
The insights and case studies provided should be read as a cross-section of WFP’s work where the application of innovative actions is yielding a measurable positive impact: either by allowing WFP to do its work more efficiently, or to deliver more effective outcomes for those people we are assisting.
We hope that this will provide a useful illustration of the value that can be yielded from investments in new forms of innovation in the humanitarian and longer-term resilience-building sectors.
2. The Global Food Security Landscape in 2023
As the World Food Programme (WFP) marks its 60th anniversary, the global food security situation is at a critical point. This represents the greatest and most complex food security crisis in modern times.
In 2023, WFP estimates that 345 million people are acutely food insecure across 79 countries with WFP operational presence and where data is available, an increase of around 200 million people compared to pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels.[1]
Hunger has also grown more deeply entrenched. Up to 43.3 million people across 53 countries currently face severe hunger emergencies (IPC/CH Phase 4 and above or equivalent, including severely food insecure) as of April 2023 and are one step away from falling into famine if they do not receive immediate life- and livelihoods-saving assistance. This number has risen from 28.6 million in 2019 and includes at least 343,000 people who are expected to experience catastrophic conditions in Burkina Faso, Mali, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen.[2]
Furthermore, the 2022 report on The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World highlights that up to 828 million people were chronically food insecure (undernourished).[3]
These concerning headline numbers should be understood in the context of persistent and deteriorating underlying trends driving hunger and malnutrition. New wars and unresolved conflicts, the global climate crisis and recurrent economic shocks – including the ongoing economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic – are driving this downward spiral. A setback in poverty eradication, growing inequality and skyrocketing numbers of forcibly displaced have exacerbated the situation.
3. The response required
In this environment, it is critical that we step up to help those in need with high-quality, targeted programmes that can meet the scale of the challenge. This means addressing both short-term acute food insecurity and malnutrition, and addressing root causes of hunger.
At WFP we frame this as two continuous, connected agendas to tackle the global food security crisis: Saving Lives and Changing Lives.
- WFP’s Saving Lives work targets support towards people experiencing acute food insecurity due to an emergency or protracted crisis. This encompasses WFP programmes and thematic areas that enable people to better meet their urgent food and nutrition needs.[4] Like in Yemen for example, where WFP is delivering lifesaving assistance to around 13 million acutely food insecure people (with in-kind food such as wheat and vegetable oil, and cash-based transfers),[5] or in Ethiopia, where in 2022 WFP’s targeted supplementary feeding (TSF) programme assisted 2 million children aged 6-59 months with the treatment of moderate acute malnutrition, and treated over 1 million pregnant and breastfeeding mothers with acute malnutrition.[6]
- WFP’s Changing Lives work encompasses the programmes and thematic areas that build resilience and self-sufficiency for the longer term and address root causes of hunger for people subject to recurring shocks, stressors and structural vulnerabilities. For the most part, they are programmes that:
- Support better nutrition, health and education outcomes,[7] like in Benin where in 2022 WFP supported almost 1.2 million students with school feeding – the majority of them supported under the National Integrated School Feeding Programme (PNASI), which WFP is implementing on behalf of the Government of Benin.[8]
- Support improved and sustainable livelihoods,[9] like in Malawi, where in 2022 WFP engaged 118,000 households in livelihoods programmes to boost crop production, reduce vulnerability to climate shocks, tackle food waste and increase access to markets.[10]
- Strengthen national programmes and systems,[11] like in Cambodia, where WFP is working to strengthen the capacity of national, subnational and local actors to design, implement, coordinate and monitor effective food security and nutrition interventions.[12]
Critically, these two agendas are linked. Changing Lives work reinforces Saving Lives work. In many contexts, the pressure on WFP and our partners to save lives will stay persistently high unless vulnerable communities’ lives are changed through enhanced resilience and efforts to address the underlying challenges that fuel hunger.
4. Innovation and innovative actions at scale
In 2022, WFP and its partners reached a record 158 million people with food, cash, and commodity vouchers. This represents the largest number of people WFP has ever assisted in our 60-year history. And yet, it wasn’t enough to arrest the escalation in the number of people experiencing food insecurity, as outlined above.
Despite donors’ continued generosity there is a growing gap between the assistance that humanitarian and development actors can provide, and the number of people in need. For WFP this often translates to reduced food rations or reduced value of cash transfers for vulnerable people. For instance, WFP has been forced to cut back its lifesaving assistance for all Rohingya refugees living in the camps in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. As of March 2023, WFP has reduced its General Food Assistance voucher value from US$12 to US$10 per person per month, due to a US$125 million funding shortfall. Where WFP implements such reductions in assistance, there is a high level of risk that acute food insecurity could be further exacerbated.[13] So clearly, a business-as-usual approach to tackling humanitarian and food crises will not be enough.
It is therefore imperative that the design and implementation of assistance is as efficient and effective as possible. The financial resources that are available need to stretch further. And we must deliver programmes with greater speed and alacrity. More innovation will be essential to meeting these aims.
This is a mindset that is wholly embraced by WFP. Innovation and technology have been designated as key ‘enablers’ of WFP’s Strategic Plan, in both the Saving Lives and Changing Lives agendas.
As WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain stated on assuming her new role: “My priorities are clear: increase our resources, improve our effectiveness, and scale up partnerships and innovation to bring modern solutions to those most in need”. This focus is welcome and builds on WFP’s substantial investment in this space through the WFP Innovation Accelerator.
One of the pioneering innovation structures within the UN and wider impact ecosystem, the Innovation Accelerator was established in 2015 in Munich, Germany, to disrupt hunger and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It identifies, supports and scales high-impact innovations, external startups, non-profit innovations and internal WFP solutions. It provides innovators with mentorship, hands-on assistance, access to funding, and connects them to WFP’s field operations.
While targeting UN 2023 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goal 2 (‘Zero Hunger’), WFP’s Innovation Accelerator also provides innovation services to other UN and government agencies, accelerating impact-driven ventures around the world and contributing to strengthening the innovation ecosystem while driving progress holistically towards other Sustainable Development Goals.
To date, the WFP Innovation Accelerator has supported over 120 innovations, with 22 scaling-up globally to achieve significant impact. In 2022 alone, 37 million people across 88 countries were reached by Accelerator-supported innovations. Such innovations have raised more than $200 million in co-funding (via private and public investors as well as Accelerator-provided funding).
In the past two years, the WFP Innovation Accelerator has intensified work in ‘innovative finance’, launching the Innovative Finance and Venture Launchpad portfolio. The objective is to act as an enabler for WFP, to mobilise additional resources for programmatic interventions and to foster financial inclusion for the people we serve.
The rationale is that traditional grant-based funding alone may not provide sufficient resources to facilitate the Sustainable Goals by 2030. New forms of sustainable financing, pooling capital from public donors, philanthropies, development banks, and impact investors are crucial to closing the funding gap and achieving social impact at scale.
Two pioneering mechanisms being overseen at WFP’s Innovation Accelerator are SheCan, a Blended Finance platform that promotes women’s economic empowerment, and WFP Innovation Bridge, a catalytic financing facility that provides recoverable grants and concessional loans and guarantees to early-stage innovations, in close partnership with the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF).
Executive Director McCain has also outlined plans to establish an innovation taskforce, comprising the best minds in both the public and private sectors to recommend measurable steps to address hunger.[14]
The following sections of this insights paper illustrate how WFP is implementing this approach in practice, in a selected range of WFP’s programmes in both the Saving Lives and Changing Lives agendas.
They contain illustrative case studies on WFP’s innovative actions being delivered at scale across several areas of programming: including WFP’s processes and institutional arrangements; and the programmatic innovation that has been mainstreamed throughout WFP’s provision of humanitarian and longer-term assistance: from cash-based transfers, to nutrition assistance, to climate-focused programmes.
These examples do not represent an exhaustive list of WFP’s programmatic innovations being implemented around the world. Rather, they are a cross-section of WFP’s work, and an insight into the valuable role that innovation can play in allowing humanitarian and development actors to address the scale of global food insecurity that we see today.
4.1. Cash-based Transfers (CBT)
WFP’s cash-based transfer (CBT) programmes are a core part of WFP’s programme offers in the Saving Lives and Changing Lives agendas. Ten years ago, CBT were positioned simply as an innovation to send people money to buy food. Since then, WFP has evolved its use of CBT in line with emerging technologies and a shifting food security context: WFP has accumulated technical expertise that allows it to reach people faster and more effectively, and a deeper understanding of the transformative impact that cash assistance can have on people’s lives.
This form of assistance has proven to be a key innovation in its own right. It gives people the freedom to meet their essential needs as they choose, and stimulates local economies.
WFP has leveraged the growth of mobile money to send cash to people in hard-to-reach contexts. Cash-based programmes can be a starting point for financial inclusion by providing access to – and usage of – accounts and financial services to unbanked and underserved populations, often for the first time. When women are economically empowered, everyone benefits: economies grow, more girls are kept in school for longer, fewer children are married, and children’s nutrition improves. Unleashing women’s potential through such empowerment reduces poverty, and with it hunger.
Additionally, WFP is pioneering supporting government social protection programmes to create change at scale. During the COVID-19 pandemic, WFP supported 65 countries to adapt or scale-up social protection measures. Innovation is key for us to unlock the benefits of cash. In this case, innovation has meant that we make our cash operations easier and simpler for our colleagues in the field. We help WFP Country Offices create more effective and efficient cash programmes, and use innovation to create tools that they can adapt to their different country contexts.
Today, WFP sends money to people in 72 countries, including those that have been hardest hit during the global food crisis, such as Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Sudan, where markets are functioning, but people can’t afford to buy food. Up to 80 percent of total cash-based transfers assistance was distributed in emergency operations in 2022, including those in Somalia ($474 million); Ukraine ($383 million); and Afghanistan ($357 million).
In addition to specific projects tackling different needs, one of the key areas WFP is working on is assurance. WFP created centralised Cash Services to make it easier and more efficient to implement cash programmes. It means that reconciliation processes and audits will also become simpler for WFP’s Country Offices. Cash Services make it easier for Country Offices to ensure the right people receive the right amount of money when they need it most. WFP offers a suite of specialized expertise and tools for the delivery of cash programmes such as DAT (Data Assurance Tool) and the Payment Instrument Tracking (PIT) app.
The Data Assurance Tool (DAT)
We often manage many different datasets in our cash programmes that originate from different sources and have different formats. We have many important business needs for data, including being able to analyse it, detect anomalies and possible duplicate identities, derive insights over time, and reconcile transfers quickly to make sure we are sending money to the right people.
DAT supports implementation services through its data acquisition and secure storage functionalities, preventive and corrective controls, and detective controls and analytics to make data more accessible, provide secure and auditable data transformations and improve data quality, and to provide insights on cash operations quality, effectiveness, and assurance.
Verification and Card Services
Driven by the core challenges experienced by operations in the field, the Payment Instrument Tracking application was launched in 2020. Payment Instrument Tracking (PIT) is a single system providing the ability to capture the end-to-end process for tracking payment cards, including their last mile delivery. Run by WFP’s Cash-Based Transfer division and supported by the WFP Innovation Accelerator Scale Up Enablement programme, the two-part application enables WFP to provide better service to beneficiaries by facilitating a simple and secure card distribution and identity verification process. This means shorter waiting times and a reduced risk of clerical errors. The innovation leverages open-source android devices that can be easily sourced locally. The application can be used offline and its modularity makes it flexible to adapt to specific contextual needs.
Since its launch in 2020, PIT has scaled up to fifteen countries with the most recent being Ukraine. In Ukraine alone, PIT will be used to verify, distribute, and track the entire life cycle of commodity vouchers for hot meals for one million displaced persons per month. In addition to the conventional use of PIT, using the application for the commodity voucher will allow for digital reconciliation of the number of vouchers distributed and be used to create a payment/beneficiary list for subsequent distributions. In 2022 the project digitally managed 500,000 payment cards and PINs, reaching 2.8 million people across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia
plugPAY
Developed by the Finance, Cash-Based Transfers and Technology Divisions at WFP, plugPAY is a digital payment solution that allows people to rapidly receive WFP’s cash assistance. Using a human-centered approach, plugPAY incorporates direct transfers from WFP accounts so people can receive payments via their instrument of choice, directly into their own accounts. This ‘one-stop-shop’ approach uses standardized terms, procedures, and protocols, while also supporting governments in their transition towards interoperable and inclusive financial services ecosystems.
By the end of 2021, plugPay’s team validated their proof of concept in Zambia, reaching 17,000 people and reducing WFP’s transfer costs to FSPs from six percent to 0.2 percent, while the onboarding time for users was reduced by 90 percent. In 2022, plugPAY scaled up operations in Zambia and launched in Sri Lanka, reaching over 25,000 people in total. PlugPAY reached the one million USD transfer value milestone by the end of December 2022.
Self-registration enabling rapid & remote cash assistance in Ukraine
The war in Ukraine continues to displace people, damage infrastructure, disrupt supply chains and hold back the country’s economy. More than 5 million Ukrainians are internally displaced and nearly 8 million are living as refugees in Europe. One in three households is estimated to be food-insecure, rising to one in two in some areas of the east and south.
WFP teams in Ukraine and Moldova, and those in the Cash-Based Transfers, Technology, Finance, and the Programme Divisions of WFP worked quickly to develop an innovative self-registration tool that allows people to be identified and registered in a safe and reliable way via a smartphone.
This powerful and rapidly scalable self-registration innovation puts people at the heart of the cash programming process. It accurately logs the number of people in need of assistance and their eligibility, while maintaining the integrity of data in the system. The safe and secure tool has a back-end system that incorporates multiple corporate data, payment, and communication systems. Its interoperability means that people in challenging locations can receive their cash within 48 hours, compared to the usual four weeks.
WFP supports 3 million people a month in Ukraine, using a flexible mix of food and cash assistance (including work with local partners to distribute food rations near the frontline). Since the start of the conflict, the total monetary investment value into Ukraine’s economy by WFP is estimated to be around $815 million – with the majority being attributed to cash assistance, strengthening individual purchasing power and domestic spending. WFP uses blockchain technology to ensure deduplication of beneficiaries, so that essential cash resources are used effectively.
4.2. Climate-focused programmes
The climate crisis is a key driver of global hunger. In the absence of critical progress on greenhouse gas emissions reductions, climate change is accelerating losses and damages in food systems which disproportionately affect the most vulnerable people, communities, and countries.
Against this backdrop, WFP is called upon to help local communities in climate risk hot spots to build resilience to climate shocks and stresses, and to protect the most vulnerable before climate hazards turn into disasters. Alongside a more purposeful scaling-up of emergency preparedness, this involves strengthening innovative solutions that leverage early warning and climate information systems, as well as anticipatory action, disaster risk financing and insurance mechanisms.
Anticipatory Action (AA)
WFP recognizes the need for more forward-looking risk management systems to avoid predictable climate hazards turning into humanitarian emergencies. Thanks to progress in climate modelling and impact-based forecasting, this is now possible: robust early warning systems can facilitate decisions to release pre-arranged financing for pre-agreed actions which can protect lives and livelihoods before new climate shocks occur. Such anticipatory actions save lives, time, and money.
Launched in 2015, WFP’s AA portfolio includes 28 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Over 3 million people are covered, which means they are eligible to receive anticipatory action and early warning information in case a drought, flood or cyclone is forecasted. In 2022, a total of $16.5 million was rapidly disbursed for anticipatory activations in Somalia, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Niger, Nepal, and the Dominican Republic, resulting in 1.7 million people receiving anticipatory assistance as well as early warning messages to protect their lives, food security and livelihoods ahead of predicted flood, cyclone, or drought events.
For example, Somalia faces catastrophic hunger, with the extreme levels of drought further compounding the impacts of other recurrent climate shocks, persistent insecurity and instability. Five consecutive failed rainy seasons and the driest conditions in 40 years have contributed to 6.5 million people facing acute food insecurity. Shockingly, 1.84 million children under 5 face acute malnutrition, with 478,000 facing severe malnutrition and the risk of death without immediate treatment. Since the start of the climate crisis, over 1.5 million people have been displaced due to drought conditions.
In 2022, WFP implemented its largest anticipatory action activation in Somalia. Based on predictions of a fourth and fifth consecutive drought, WFP worked with the Government to deliver anticipatory cash transfers to almost 207,000 people through Somalia’s Shock-Responsive Safety Net. WFP also disseminated early warning messages to 1.2 million people by radio to explain the risk of drought to people’s crops and livelihoods, and suggested actions that communities could take to mitigate and prepare for the predicted drought conditions. Combined, anticipatory cash transfers and early warning information empowered at-risk populations to make better informed decisions and prevent losses and damages from the predicted consecutive drought seasons.
PRISM (Platform for Real-Time Impact and Situation Monitoring)
PRISM is a climate risk monitoring system that enables governments in low- and middle-income countries to access climate hazard data via an open-source software solution. PRISM highlights the risks and impacts of droughts, floods, and tropical storms, alongside data on socioeconomic vulnerability. Incorporating different data streams into a single interactive map presents decision makers with comprehensive and actionable information on vulnerable populations exposed to hazards, allowing them to prioritize assistance and inform disaster risk reduction and social assistance programmes.
PRISM has expanded from Cambodia and Indonesia into Mongolia and Sri Lanka. Expansion into sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America is expected in 2023.
PRISM was included in the Digital Public Goods Alliance registry in 2021, recognizing its contribution as open-source software to achieve the SDGs.
The R4 Rural Resilience initiative
As WFP’s flagship microinsurance programme, R4’s innovative integrated climate risk management approach, enables the poorest smallholder farmers to secure their livelihoods, build resilience to climate-related shocks and access crop insurance through four risk management strategies:
- Risk Reduction: Use of best-practice agricultural and post-harvest loss techniques, access to timely climate information services, etc.
- Risk Transfer: Access to microinsurance to transfer most catastrophic shocks when engaging in risk reduction activities.
- Risk Retention: Access to savings to absorb more frequent and less severe shocks.
- Prudent Risk Taking: Increasing investment, including access to credit and markets, to improve income generation.
In 2022, R4 reached 2 million people across 15 countries, either through direct support to farmers, or through capacity strengthening to governments, like in Zambia and the DRC. Last year, the majority of payouts were triggered in Malawi, Kenya, Guatemala, and Senegal. The evidence gathered from WFP-supported insurance programmes indicate that insured farmers are better able to cope with climate shocks compared to uninsured households. For example, insured farmers in Senegal only reduced their consumption by 8 percent after an extreme drought versus a reduction of 44 percent by uninsured. Across the country portfolio, WFP beneficiaries primarily reported using payouts to buy food (60 percent), agricultural inputs (34 percent) and for accessing basic services (24 percent). In Ethiopia, between August 2021 and February 2022, 28,297 pastoralist households received payouts totalling US$1.8 million over three rounds of consecutive distributions as drought persisted in the region. Surveys conducted after the payouts revealed that 70 percent of the pastoralists utilized their assistance within the first week, with 48 percent of the payout going towards protecting livestock (33 percent on feed and 15 percent on animal health).
In 2021, 3,500 R4 households in south Madagascar who were facing famine like conditions after several consecutive droughts received a $144 payout each. This payout was equal to seven months of unconditional cash transfers provided by WFP as part of its response.
R4 operates in 15 countries, including Bangladesh, Cuba, Burkina Faso, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Senegal, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In collaboration with the WFP Innovation Accelerator, R4 commenced expansion in 2022, to provide microinsurance to smallholder cocoa farmers in West Africa, beginning with Ivory Coast.
WFP is launching a weather-index based insurance product in Kyrgyzstan in Spring 2023 to support local governments to protect vulnerable livestock herders against the consequences of extended winters and extreme droughts.
4.3. Nutrition programmes
Diets poor in vitamins, minerals and other nutrients are affecting the health, well-being and life prospects of hundreds of millions. After more than a decade of progress, malnutrition is on the rise globally, underpinning almost half of all child deaths. Furthermore, inadequate diets early in life have irreversible effects on health, growth and cognitive development of at least a quarter of all children currently under five worldwide. Unhealthy diets and deficiencies of vitamins and minerals affect the health and productivity of billions worldwide, and those who are food insecure are worst affected and can do very little to improve the quality of their diet.
There are however innovations that can contribute to making diets healthier, more nutritious and enable people to reach their full potential. Such innovations enable WFP to develop more targeted and sustainable solutions that promote healthy diets and lifestyles, prevent and treat malnutrition, and ultimately contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These innovations are aimed at improving the quality and nutritional value of the food provided and increasing the uptake of nutrition education and behaviour change interventions.
Examples of these innovative approaches to tackle malnutrition include a digital tool to streamline nutrition programme decision making, monitoring and reporting (CODA); nutrition-based e-learning activities (NutriFami), AI for nutrition surveys (Voice to Text AI), digital marketplace for nutrition (Ancestral Markets) and food fortification as a cost-effective way to add vitamins and minerals to staple foods.
WFP is committed to delivering nutrition assistance in emergencies, while tackling root causes of malnutrition so the most vulnerable are better equipped to cope with shocks.
CODA (Conditional On-Demand Assistance)
In resource-poor facilities, many field operations continue to rely on paper-based recording systems for their nutrition data gathering and analytics processes. This manual method can be inefficient and ineffective and often leads to errors, inability to track individual children through continuum of care and difficulties in both extracting and understanding the collected information. These gaping data holes limit the decision-making abilities of active stakeholders and can catalyze poor health and nutrition outcomes within the most vulnerable communities.
CODA is a digital solution designed to simplify and streamline nutrition programme guidelines and to record individual data. Using a mobile device and a durable smartcard, CODA replaces paper-based records to ensure individual information can be recorded, tracked, and monitored at an individual level. The goal is to empower users (health care workers) to provide better assistance to people and to enable stakeholders to make informed nutrition decisions through near to real-time data.
CODA fills a gap commonly identified in WFP operations related to case management, identification of people in need, optimization of resources, and informed decision making. The service is composed of both operational services and the digital product, to ensure that the right community receives the right assistance at the right time.
Chakki
Pakistan’s national nutrition survey (2018) showed that 36.9 percent of the population faced food insecurity. Additionally, in children under 5, 18 percent were suffering from acute malnutrition; around 40 percent were stunted; and 29 percent were underweight.
Chakki is an innovative solution that aims to improve access to fortified wheat flour for up to 70 percent of Pakistan’s population. To achieve this, small-scale millers (known as chakkis) are provided with skills, education, funding mechanisms, and innovative technology to both fortify flour, and in turn, educate their clients. By fortifying flour and facilitating its consumption, as well as teaching buyers about nutrition and health, Chakki is aiming to holistically tackle malnutrition in Pakistan.
In 2022, Chakki reached 2.2 million people, while increasing consumer demand for fortified food from 26 percent to 93 percent. It also raised $700,000 in funding and has integrated with government social security net programmes. Furthermore, Chakki established a revolving fund with local nutrition stakeholders to cover the cost of the transition to fortified flour for small mills.
Sanku
Up to 95 percent of the Tanzanian population (over 50 million people) do not benefit from large-scale food fortification programs because they source their flour primarily from small-scale mills that lack the capacity to fortify their product.
Sanku provides fortification tools, training and other support to small maize flour mills. Fortification technology comes in the form of a “dosifier” which enables small-scale mills to fortify their flour with a precise amount of critical micronutrients. Sanku’s IoT-enabled dosifiers facilitate remote monitoring of the accuracy of nutrient premix dosing and quantity of fortified flour produced. Sanku offsets the costs of the millers’ nutrients by bulk buying empty pink flour bags, which are then sold to the millers to pack their flour. The margins from flour bag sales cover the entire cost of the millers’ nutrients, so mills can fortify their flour at no added cost.
In 2022, Sanku reached 4.5 million people (including almost 277,000 in Kenya as an expansion market). In total, 822 dosifiers were installed, with 193 in project mills (182 in Tanzania, 11 in Kenya). Supported by the WFP Innovation Accelerator and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Sanku is scaling in Tanzania, with plans to expand and develop solutions to reach new countries/markets.
WFP and Royal DSM partnership
Since 2007, WFP and the nutrition, health and sustainable living company Royal DSM have worked as partners towards the common goal of ending malnutrition worldwide. Under the banner of “Improving Nutrition, Improving Lives”, the partnership aims to eliminate ‘hidden hunger’, a deficiency in one or more micronutrients, by creating sustainable and systemic change. Over 2 billion people, including one in two pre-school-aged children and two in three women of reproductive age, suffer from micronutrient deficiencies.
Through the partnership, WFP and DSM collaborate to: promote the global scale-up of fortified rice; increase the availability of, demand for, and consumption of nutritious foods on the open market; contribute to the global evidence base for investment in nutrition; and jointly advocate for investment in nutrition & raise awareness about our partnership. In particular, the partnership drives production and consumption of fortified rice, reaching more than 15 million people. In Bangladesh, for example, the partnership has supported more than 70 SMEs in building their capacity to produce fortified rice which looks, cooks, and tastes just like ordinary rice but includes essential vitamins and minerals that help curb micronutrient deficiencies.
4.4. Food security Research, Monitoring and Assessment
Food security is dynamic. In order to maximize humanitarian impact, it is imperative to effectively identify vulnerable populations in need of humanitarian assistance. This is why WFP has a full ecosystem aiming at providing globally accessible data. WFP uses real-time monitoring – a groundbreaking approach to food security monitoring and analysis, to provide partners and global decision-makers with streaming analytics on food security and key drivers – all in real time and in one place.
Real-time monitoring to underpins effective operations
To enhance targeted, effective, and efficient operations, real-time monitoring systems aim to provide near-immediate warning of deteriorations in the food security situation of vulnerable households, enabling decision-makers, both global and local, to respond to crises as they happen. Real-time monitoring systems have been proven to provide upwards of 10 weeks of early warning in cases of food security crises, responding to deterioration months before changes in regular acute food security classifications. This information is regularly employed in the field, giving WFP and its partners a significant head-start in addressing sudden deteriorations in countries like Haiti, Afghanistan and Somalia.
Real-time monitoring data for public good
WFP’s real-time monitoring data is a free public good available to the public and the broader humanitarian community to improve complementarity and facilitate knowledge sharing of global food security monitoring systems. Notably, real-time monitoring data is directly used in IPC/CH processes, providing a unique source of continuous data for global food security classifications. Additionally, data from the real-time monitoring systems feeds into projects and initiatives led by partners such as the World Bank, the Global Alliance for Food Security, the German Aerospace Center, the European Commission and many more
HungerMapLIVE Ecosystem: Predicting Global Food Security in Near Real-time
To make real-time data as digestible and actionable as possible, all information is processed and displayed in the HungerMapLIVE – an integrated global hunger monitoring platform that collects, processes and displays real-time information on key food security metrics (like insufficient food consumption scores, or crisis or emergency livelihood coping metrics), conflict, weather events, and other drivers of food insecurity – all in real-time and in one place. The HungerMapLIVE product ecosystem includes:
- The HungerMapLIVE global monitoring dashboard
- Global Insights & Key Trends daily reports
- Regional Insights & Key Trends daily reports
- Country-level Insights & Key Trends daily reports
Advanced data visualization tools then provide a holistic view of food security at the global, regional and country levels, via an interactive online map (https://hungermap.wfp.org/).
4.5. Supply Chain Planning and Optimization
In an environment of limited resources and evolving needs, planning and optimization of our operations is at the core of every effort to safeguard WFP’s ability to deliver on its mandate in a timely and cost-efficient manner. WFP’s Supply Chain Planning & Optimization teams leverage best practices in supply chain management and advanced analytics to enable faster response to emergencies, maximize use of available funding, minimize risks of pipeline breaks and develop contingency plans in response to anticipated challenges. Examples of this work include:
Optimus: optimizing operation designs
One of WFP’s key challenges globally is identifying efficient and effective ways to serve people that require assistance. Optimus is an innovative tool that puts advanced analytics at the center of WFP’s decision-making processes. Via this online decision support system, WFP staff on the ground can quickly explore and compare different operational plans, allowing them to rapidly identify the most cost-effective ways to assist people in need.
By incorporating multiple data sources, including beneficiary numbers, sourcing options, transport routes, and nutritional values, WFP staff can create scenarios, or ask Optimus to find optimal plans that take into account operational restrictions and preferences, including lead times, funding, nutritional value targets, and local procurement targets. Datasets are analyzed using mathematical models, providing key insights into food basket design, sourcing strategies, and delivery networks for any WFP operation.
Optimus has so far been used in 48 country offices, including complex emergencies such as Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Haiti, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. It reached 7.2 million people in 2022, including 6 million in Ethiopia and Madagascar (two countries facing emergency level crises). To date, $50 million of savings have been shown.
Prisma: Support for operational decision-making
The extensive range of data and processes used in WFP’s operations requires sophisticated, integrated systems that allow for a holistic picture of WFP’s operations and to foresee potential issues. This is necessary to avoid delays, food commodity expiries, commodity pipeline breaks, and additional operational costs. WFP’s planners use a tool called Prisma, a control tower that provides near-real-time, end-to-end visibility on WFP operations. Prisma automates complex analyses and reconciliations across units and systems that would otherwise require high workload and be prone to human errors. Prisma allows WFP’s country office management to take better planning decisions, and alerts on issues and potential risks affecting each operation.
5. Conclusion
As this insights paper illustrates, innovative actions have a critical role to play in the fight against global hunger and humanitarian crises more broadly.
In an environment where financial resources are being stretched and food security needs are growing, WFP and our partners cannot afford to neglect the efficiency and impact gains that new innovations can offer when applied at scale. As is evident in the case studies provided above, at WFP we are already seeing pay-offs on our investments in innovation: through efficiency savings and improved impact in our programming, in both our Saving Lives and Changing Lives work.
Moreover, as new technologies emerge and become more accessible and applicable, even in hard-to-reach contexts, there is an even greater incentive to take advantage of the opportunities on offer.
As the examples in this paper demonstrate, innovation in both process and products have become key weapons in the response to hunger. We hope that they will inspire our partners and colleagues in the humanitarian sector to double down on time, resource and staff investments in this area.
For our part, WFP is committed to continuing its investment in scaling up and rolling out existing and new applications of innovation, as we stay the course in our pursuit of a world without hunger.
[1] WFP. February 2023. WFP Global Operational Response Plan: Update #7 – February 2023.
[2] WFP. April 2023. WFP Corporate Alert System April 2023.
[3] FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO. 2022. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022.
[4] Programmes that feed into Strategic Outcome 1 in WFP’s Strategic Plan 2022-2025.
[5] WFP Yemen Annual Country Report 2022.
[6] WFP Ethiopia Annual Country Report 2022.
[7] Programmes that feed into Strategic Outcome 2 in WFP’s Strategic Plan 2022-2025.
[8] WFP Benin Annual Country Report 2022.
[9] Programmes that feed into Strategic Outcome 3 in WFP’s Strategic Plan 2022-2025.
[10] WFP Malawi Annual Country report 2022.
[11] Programmes that feed into Strategic Outcome 4 in WFP’s Strategic Plan 2022-2025.
[12] WFP Cambodia Country Strategic Plan 2019-2023.
[13] WFP. April 2023. WFP Corporate Alert System April 2023.
[14] Executive Director Cindy McCain, first remarks on appointment at WFP – April 2023.