Food Assistance for Assets

The world’s most vulnerable people tend to live in degraded environments, where resources are scarce and the threat of disaster high. For years now, WFP has worked to tie humanitarian food assistance into a longer-term strategy that reduces hunger and boosts resilience. Our Food Assistance for Assets initiative offers food, vouchers or cash in exchange for building or refurbishing public utility projects – schools, roads, bridges or wells.

School meals

School meals (and take-home food for schoolchildren) are a distinctive WFP contribution to reducing hunger and promoting resilience. In many cases, a school meal provided by us is the only hot meal a child will have. The meals keep the child in class – girls in particular – and relieve pressure on the family. They add value to investment in education and strengthen nations in the long term, nurturing productivity and growth. When the produce is supplied by local farmers under the “homegrown school feeding” system, the economic impact is immediately felt.

Lack of cash, quality seeds or tools; post-harvest losses; and limited access to markets – all trap smallholder households in a low productivity cycle. Initiated by WFP, the Farm to Market Alliance is a consortium of farming-oriented institutions and agri-businesses: it aims to help smallholders move up the value chain, find outlets for their produce, and shift production from a subsistence to a commercial model.

Cash transfers

Where markets work well, cash transfers empower families to meet essential needs. Dispensed as physical banknotes, e-money or mobile credit, through vouchers or debit cards, cash takes up an ever-increasing share of WFP’s overall assistance. It gives households a measure of choice. It can stimulate local markets, and cut procurement and transport costs. Distributing cash, in other words, may save cash, offering value to both donors and people in need.

The goal of food-secure societies implies a gender transformative agenda. This is central to WFP’s policy and practice. Whether we support women smallholder farmers; protect beneficiaries from gender-based violence; engage men in nutrition responsibilities; enable girls to finish their education; or increase women’s say in the way food is shared within families, the pursuit of equal and equitable access to food is a primary concern.

Internally too, we aim to reach gender parity among staff, in line with the United Nations System-wide Strategy endorsed by the UN Secretary General in August 2017. The current breakdown suggests there is considerable room for progress, with women particularly under-represented in the “power roles” traditionally associated with male employment.

If we are to stand a chance of achieving Zero Hunger, we must relentlessly adapt: the race is on for the best ways to deliver food security for the greatest number, starting with the furthest behind. At WFP, data-led technological change and digital reinvention are both matters of principle and operational necessities. Drones are becoming our analytical allies; blockchain, a preferred delivery method; and knowledge-sharing, a strategic empowerment tool. Investment in innovation is bearing fruit, much of it with the potential to serve broader development aims. SCOPE – WFP’s platform designed to manage digital identities and the assistance provided to individuals – is emerging as a solution for the wider humanitarian community. It allows other organizations to manage their own assistance, and supports governments in implementing their social protection activities.

In advocating for food security, WFP also sees it as its mission to promote new perspectives. In 2017, we launched an index that seeks to quantify how affordable basic food is – or not – in various developing countries, at purchasing power parity with developed nations. The results are, in some cases, extreme: they shine a stark light on global inequalities in access to food.

Harnessing partnerships

Sustainable development is more than the sum of separate development agendas. At WFP, partnership, as mandated by SDG 17, has long been a core operational concept. Without partnerships, we could not deliver a variety of food-related services in more than 80 countries; synchronize our food assistance with other life-saving and development initiatives; build capacity, internally and among the governments that host us; or pursue our “whole of society” vision which, in every nation, seeks to enlist civil society groups in achieving Zero Hunger.

Humanitarian needs are growing much faster than available funding – in WFP’s case, despite a peak in donor contributions in 2017, we would have required more than half as much again to avoid painful choices. We have striven to make the money go further. Even so, some beneficiaries saw their rations halved; some families were prioritized over their neighbours; and some projects were discontinued altogether. The donor base remains highly concentrated, with the lion’s share made up by large developed nations and the European Union. Great efforts are being made to diversify funding sources and expand private sector, as well as individual, contributions. Flexible or “unearmarked” funding – which permits WFP to allocate the money where it is most needed – was proportionally at a 20-year low in 2017.