The Need

Fast Facts

• Some 799 million people go to bed hungry each night — most of them women and children.
• More than 153 million children below the age of 5 are underweight.
• Reducing malnutrition among children under age 5 in poor countries can decrease child mortality by 20 percent.

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World Vision's Response

Food aid

• Feeding centers | Following a crisis, World Vision establishes emergency feeding clinics and often provides supplemental food until the next harvest.

• Agricultural assistance | World Vision provides farmers with seeds and tools for raising crops and livestock.
• Agricultural training | We teach farmers improved agricultural techniques such as crop rotation, drip irrigation and the planting of trees that will enrich over worked soil.
• Nutrition education | World Vision trains parents in the importance of feeding their children foods that contain essential nutrients such as vitamins A and C.

• Improving product storage | World Vision helps communities protect their available food resources with new storage techniques. In Mali, for example, we built granaries that decreased the annual food storage loss from 30 percent to 3 percent.
• Marketing assistance | By identifying and providing resources for marketable products, World Vision helps farmers earn a stable income for their families. For example, we helped Brazilian farmers cultivate and market a crop of organic peppers after local environmental changes made it impossible to grow their previous crops.
• Natural resource management | World Vision emphasizes the value of caring for natural resources. Farmers are taught to protect their greatest asset — their land — by preventing soil degradation, increasing sustainability and enhancing productivity.

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Your Opportunity to Help

• $20 provides a hungry family with livestock such as ducks and chickens. The family will benefit from protein rich eggs throughout the year. Extra eggs and chicks can be sold to buy medicine or help pay for a child's school tuition.
• $48 helps families get back on their feet with resources like seeds, tools and training to grow an abundance of food.
• $80 multiplies 8 times in value to provide $640 worth of food relief to hungry children and families.

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Defaru's Story

Years of meager harvests left Defaru Deika feeling defeated by his own land. Watching his children go hungry every night, Defaru considered abandoning his farm in rural Ethiopia. Then World Vision offered Defaru six apple seedlings and taught him new agricultural techniques. "If World Vision wasn't here, I would have had to go elsewhere to find a job," he says. "My children would have suffered." Today, Defaru's farm is flourishing. And instead of being separated from his family, Defaru is tending his fields and giving his children the things they need — nutritious food, a new house and an education. "He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry." — Psalm 146:7 (NIV) back to top