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The Hunger Crisis.

Help children protect their futures from hunger.

Right now, children across the world are facing a perfect storm of crises. Conflict, climate change and economic instability are jeopardizing families' access to nutritious food and threatening the lives of 153 million children.  

Hunger knows no borders, no boundaries and no limits. It's a force that drains a child's energy, silences their play, and turns their dreams to dust. They should be exploring with their friends or expanding their minds in class. Instead, too many are worrying about when their next meal will be.

With our expertise and their resilience, we can beat hunger together. Let’s break the cycle and feed children’s futures. 

Child being fed

Donate now to end child hunger

Hunger hurts a whole child's world.
They urgently need your help.

Shayesta’s* Story.

In Afghanistan, 15.5 million people are facing crisis levels of food insecurity, including 3.2 million children suffering with severe acute malnutrition. The current catastrophic combination of extreme drought, floods and the economic crisis means many families, like Khalid and Zahid’s, are struggling to put food on the table.  

Six months ago, they tragically lost their daughter Benafsha*, who was 18 months old at the time. Benafsha was malnourished and then contracted measles. She died in her mother’s arms. Now, their one-year-old daughter, Shayesta, is also suffering from malnutrition.  

Zahida is scared Shayesta will also die because they do not have enough money to provide for her. 

Shayesta* is now being treated for malnutrition at one of Save the Children’s Mobile Health Clinics which provide primary, newborn, and maternal healthcare, nutrition, and mental health services across Afghanistan. 

Our response to the Hunger Crisis.

Save the Children works in 116 countries. This means with the help of local partners; we can deliver lifesaving nutrition programming and long-term livelihood support on a truly global scale.

These are the 4 steps Save the Children takes to prevent, treat and recover from hunger: 

Step 1: Save the Children completes a food security analysis to forecast food availability and predict the impact of climate, economic or conflict shocks like El Niño or the conflict in Ukraine. 

Step 2: Anticipatory Action means we work with local communities to identify risks and then mitigate them. This reduces the impact, reduces the cost and most importantly, saves lives. 

Step 3: When hunger strikes, we are there to screen children for malnutrition, treat them with therapeutic nut pastes, provide medicines and medical care when cases have become complex, complete follow-up assessments for six months, give families food kits and provide families with cash so they can access food and other essential items. 

Step 4: Then we go beyond food. We believe in long-term, sustainable solutions to food insecurity. To do this we combine local knowledge of pastoralism, agriculture and the local economy, with our expertise in health, nutrition, forecasting and anticipatory action to provide sustainable solutions to food security and hunger. 

All the time: We are working with local communities, international, national and local organisations and governments to stamp out inequality and food insecurity through our policy and advocacy work. 

Last year alone we reached over 70 million people with hunger-related interventions, including 37 million children thanks to your support.