Cathy Burke
CEO, The Hunger Project Australia
“In Achieving The Hunger Project Australia’s goals, every person will have enough of the right food to be healthy and productive; babies will be born strong; women and girls will be full partners in society; and people will have control over their own lives.”
The Three Guiding Pillars
The Hunger Project works in partnership with grassroots people in Africa, Asia and Latin America to develop effective bottom-up strategies. We have discovered three critical elements that, when combined, empower people to make rapid progress in overcoming hunger and poverty:
• Mobilising people at the grassroots level to build self-reliance
• Empowering women as key change agents;
• Forging partnerships with local government.
Mobilising to Build Local Self-reliance
Hunger Project Strategies seek to build people’s capacities, confidence and leadership. Our aim is to overcome the deep resignation people in the developing world often find themselves in as a result of failed development initiatives. The Hunger Project urges people not to wait to be rescued, but to take action now to meet their basic needs. We train women and men, equipping them with the skills, methods and knowledge needed to take self-reliant actions to improve their lives and conditions in their communities.
The first step is the Vision, Commitment and ActionWorkshop (VCAW). At this village-level workshop, people create their own vision for the future, commit to achieving it and outline the actions that are needed to succeed. Each participant leaves the workshop with a specific project for the following three months based entirely on local resources. In achieving this first success, people's initial inspiration develops into self-confidence.
After the VCAW, villages select local leaders, who we call "animators," who will be trained to lead the VCAW for others in the area, and to facilitate the ongoing actions that stemmed from the workshop. More
Empowering Women
Women are the key to ending hunger. Gender inequality and the subjugation of women is a condition that allows hunger to exist. Ending this will achieve breakthroughs in ending hunger. This is because the vast majority of the world's poor are women. Two-thirds of the world's illiterates are female. Of the millions of school age children not in school, the majority are girls. And today, HIV/AIDS is rapidly becoming a woman's disease. In several southern African countries, more than three-quarters of all young people living with HIV are women.
Women carry out much of the work needed to meet the basic needs, and yet they have little or no voice in the community. We work to build the women’s confidence and overcome their sense of despair and hopelessness so they can begin to achieve concrete progress. More Empowering women as key change agents
Forging Partnerships
The Hunger Project works in partnership with local government bodies to ensure that they are effective, include the leadership of women, are directly accountable to local people, and provide access to resources and information.
In order to strengthen local government, The Hunger Project also works from the top down, lobbying for state and national law changes, and in some cases court rulings, to shift power to the hands of the people.
More Forging partnerships with local government.
More Information
Transforming Lives - the African Epicentre strategy
Our Epicentre strategy is a proven large-scale, low-cost methodology for empowering the people in rural communities. It allows people to take responsibility for their own development, and to succeed in meeting their basic needs on a sustainable basis. It was recently evaluated by a leading global consultancy firm which showed that for USD$5 per annum, The Hunger Project is achieving what other organisations are achieving for USD$75 per annum. >Click to download
Corporate Social Responsibility - how your organisation can become involved.
We invite you to find out more about how we can share our thinking, methodology and strategic approaches with you. Share our commitment to ending hunger with us through investing with us, through matched employee payroll donations, corporate sponsorships, group or individual giving. > Click to download
Information Booklet
Ending hunger is not only a moral imperative, but a practical necessity. It is central to resolving an entire raft of issues – including population growth, civil unrest, war and environmental destruction – that increasingly threaten the quality of life for everyone. > Click to download
Our Philosophy:
Self Reliance
The Hunger Project believes the human spirit is wonderfully creative. We believe people have the ability and the desire to be self-reliant.
While poverty can drain human dignity, we believe that by re-energising that spirit and shifting the mindset from one of hopelessness to one of optimism, people can be the source of their own success. We also believe a shared vision is powerful and become an amazing, abundant reality.
Our goal is to end world hunger. Our methods are different from most organisations in that first we address the attitudes and then, only after that mindset has changed, do we begin action through skill building and tangible projects. This model of empowerment allows us to be more efficient.
We function at the grassroots level, finding local leaders who then work within the community to set their own agenda and priorities.
We focus on women as change-agents. Women are disproportionately impoverished, yet they carry a large part of the burden of work and raising the children. Many studies verify that women do the most to improve health, nutrition and education when given the opportunity.
We have a clear exit strategy. Strong, locally-run programmes create self-reliant individuals, therefore The Hunger Project can leave a sustainable economy in 5-9 years.
All of this leads to an efficient an effective programme. In fact, the consultants at McKinsey & Company verified that through an extensive study of our work in Uganda.
We work in Africa, India, Bangladesh and Latin America with a variety of strategic programmes, including: better farming methods and food security; microfinance-led income generation; improved health services; functional adult literacy; clean water and improved home hygiene.
Give the
Gift of Possibilities this Christmas!
