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Did you know that the world has never been closer to ending hunger?
It won’t be easy. Millions still don’t have enough to eat, and the population is growing faster than ever. Even so, experts believe that if we work together, we have a chance to end hunger by as soon as 2030.
Ending hunger and poverty while caring for the Earth has been our mission at Heifer for more than 70 years, and we know that the best way to accomplish the kind of meaningful, lasting change we’re aiming for is by focusing on long-term, sustainable solutions in addition to temporary aid.
That’s why we started with livestock, and continue to provide animals like cows and goats as an extremely effective and lasting method of fighting hunger. Watch as Chasha Veronica, a Heifer project participant, explains how becoming a goat farmer allowed her to stop begging in order to provide her family basic needs and instead become her own provider of food and income:
Gifts of livestock may be how it all began, but today goats are just the beginning. We have charged ourselves with our own ambitious goal: to end the hunger and poverty of 4 million families by 2020.
When we say ending hunger and poverty, we are literally talking about families moving all the way into self-reliance and prosperity, not simply the number of families who will have participated in our programs. By 2020, 4 million families will achieve a level of income that allows them to educate their children (including the girls); feed themselves adequately across every month of the year; and have proper housing, water, hygiene, etc. In other words, they will be able to earn a living income.
One way we are achieving this is by helping small-scale farmers work together, gain more control over their products and prices, and connect more directly to markets.
You can see how this works by taking a tour of a dairy hub--the place where smallholder dairy farmers have organized to make their product competitive in the national market.
But we won’t truly end hunger alone, or in a vacuum. Work like ours requires collaboration. We are only part of the solution. This week, USAID released their vision for a food secure future, a vision that a multitude of organizations and individuals are working hard to achieve. That’s why we are celebrating Feed the Future week with them: to celebrate our progress and use that momentum to energize even more ambitious and exciting goals that will make hunger history, once and for all.
