Global Initiatives
The Global Initiatives Team works on anti-hunger initiatives to end hunger through research, policy, and technical expertise. We adopt the mindset of think globally, act locally, collaborating across sectors to leverage resources towards scalable, equitable, and sustainable solutions to end hunger.
Our work is centralized on the areas of food security, nutrition, climate change, forced migration, livelihoods, and systems resilience.
Current Project: Hunger Free Guatemala
Guatemala is a country characterized by its abundance of natural resources and biodiversity, situated in Central America with coastlines along the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea. Yet despite its ecological riches and steady economic growth, Guatemala struggles with widespread food insecurity and malnutrition.
As of early 2023, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) estimated that 3.5 million individuals - 1 in 5 - experienced significant levels of acute food insecurity. This crisis disproportionately impacts rural and indigenous communities, who take up about half of the country's population, and is exacerbated by factors such as climate change, extreme weather events, poverty, systemic inequities, and rising costs.
Our team is working with local partners in Guatemala to collaborate and scale anti-hunger initiatives through a Food and Nutrition Landscape Analysis and build-out of Hunger Free Guatemala.
Resources
A strip of land across El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua that is vulnerable to extreme climate events like long periods of drought, putting livelihoods at risk.
HungerMap LIVE is the World Food Programme (WFP)’s global hunger monitoring system. It combines key metrics from various data sources – such as food security information, weather, population size, conflict, hazards, nutrition information and macro-economic data – to help assess, monitor and predict the magnitude and severity of hunger in near real-time. The resulting analysis is displayed on an interactive map that helps WFP staff, key decision makers and the broader humanitarian community to make more informed and timely decisions relating to food security.
The IPC Mapping Tool is an enhanced interactive interface that shows a map of all the countries the IPC works in and allows you to download population data.
The latest IPC Acute Food Insecurity analysis focuses on the entire population of Guatemala's 22 departments, totaling 17.6 million people. From March to May 2023, around 3.5 million individuals faced significant levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3 or above) and urgently require intervention. It is projected that this number will rise to 4.3 million people during the first projected period of June to August 2023, coinciding with the lean season, and then decrease to 3.1 million people from September 2023 to February 2024, which marks the harvest season.
Want to Collaborate?
To find out more about our projects and ways to collaborate, email us.