Principles

Updated January 2008

Confronting the Challenge of Ending Hunger

• Hunger persists: Each and every day, 20,000 people die as a consequence of chronic, persistent hunger. The UN reports that 1 billion of our fellow human beings live in extreme poverty – defined as living on less than $1 per day – and 854 million people are chronically hungry. This is not the kind of hunger that makes headlines, as in a famine, but a silent holocaust that continues day after day, month after month.
• Hunger can be ended: This waste of human lives is all the more tragic in that it is unnecessary. The world produces more than enough food for everyone and, if we act wisely, can continue to do so for future generations. The world community possesses the financial and technical resources necessary to end hunger.
• Hunger is not simply an issue of food: Ending hunger is central to an entire nexus of issues – including family income, health, education, environmental sustainability, human rights and social justice. During the 1990s, advocates for each of these issues came to recognize that only in solving all these issues together can any of them be solved. 
• The world has committed itself to this goal. At the 2000 Millennium Summit, the leaders of every member of the United Nations declared the intention to cut poverty and hunger in half by 2015 – and to end these conditions altogether within the coming years. This led to the creation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs are the world’s time-bound and quantified targets for addressing extreme poverty in its many dimensions – income poverty, hunger, disease, lack of adequate shelter, and exclusion – while promoting gender equality, education, and environmental sustainability.
• The MDGs represent basic human rights – the rights of each person on the planet to health, education, shelter and security as pledged in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Millennium Declaration.
• The commitment of The Hunger Project: The Hunger Project is committed to the sustainable end of hunger and extreme poverty. This means that we are committed to empowering people to create permanent, society-wide solutions that achieve the MDGs, and not content ourselves with charitable actions that only benefit a few. We are committed to pioneering the ways of thinking and working through which humanity can end hunger on a sustainable basis, and ensure that these approaches become available to everyone, everywhere.

The Need for a New Set of Principles

• Limits to the conventional approach. Ending hunger and extreme poverty is a highly complex challenge. It is increasingly clear that charitable responses and traditional top-down service-delivery programs, as useful as they may be in certain situations, are insufficient to carry the day. More importantly, The Hunger Project has come to recognize that conventional approaches are based on a framework of thinking that fundamentally misidentifies who hungry people truly are. The conventional framework of thinking treats hungry people as “mouths to feed” – as passive recipients or beneficiaries, dependent on outside aid. In doing so, it literally reinforces the conditions of powerlessness that give rise to hunger.
• Hunger is a denial of selfhood: The persistence of hunger and extreme poverty represents a more fundamental failure of human society than merely failing to provide food. Those living in conditions of hunger – most of whom are women – are subjugated, marginalized and disempowered – conditions in which centuries of humiliation can destroy any sense of autonomous selfhood, of being worthy of the most basic human rights. Those of us not living in poverty are also diminished in our selfhood. We are diminished by feelings of guilt or are cut off from experiencing our shared humanity with a large portion of our human family.
• The strategies and actions required to end hunger must emanate from a new set of principles. These principles are derived from an authentic confrontation with the commitment to end hunger, and from a deeper examination of what it means to be human.
• Discovered in action: The principles of The Hunger Project are not created in a philosophical vacuum and then applied. They evolve and are refined in the action itself. The formulation of our principles changes as our experience grows. In this way, there is no room for arrogance. On the contrary, the work of ending hunger is a rigorous teacher of a complex subject, constantly requiring a spirit of humility and openness to discovery.

The Principles of The Hunger Project:

Who We Are as Human Beings

• The human spirit – the “being” in human being. Who we are as human beings goes much deeper than our physical needs, or even our personal and social identity, our intelligence or our point of view. These are all things we have but they are not fundamentally who we are. Our human spirit - the essence of our humanity - is creative, resourceful, self-reliant, responsible, productive, and the wellspring of our human dignity. Approaches that treat hungry people as passive beneficiaries can crush human dignity and undermine the most precious resource for ending hunger – the self-reliance of hungry people themselves. The end of hunger can be achieved only through strategies that empower people to reclaim their selfhood and become the authors of their own development.
• Social conditions: Hunger and poverty are not “accidents.” They are consequences of deeply entrenched social conditions which systematically deny people – and particularly women – the opportunities they need to build lives of self-reliance and dignity. Whether these conditions manifest as corruption, bureaucratic intransigence, armed conflict, marginalization of indigenous peoples or the subjugation and disempowerment of women, they are rooted in an age-old and nearly universal patriarchal mindset that must be transformed. Transforming patriarchy is not a question of “men vs. women.” Both women and men contribute to holding patriarchy in place, and both women and men can provide leadership for its transformation.
• Harmony with nature: The same patriarchal social conditions that marginalize half of our human family also treat our natural environment as a resource to exploit rather than a trust we must preserve for all future generations. The well-being of hungry people – most of whom are food farmers – is most directly dependent on the sustainability of our natural environment. Rural women, in particular, have held the traditional role as caretakers of the environment, and possess wisdom that humanity now desperately needs.
• Interconnectedness: At a superficial level of our personal identities, we can readily see that our lives are interdependent: our personal well-being depends on the actions of all other people and our natural environment. At a deeper level, however, we are each other. When selfhood is denied to millions of people, our selfhood is diminished. And when millions of our sisters and brothers regain their dignity, the essence of our humanity is restored.

Creating a New Future

Ending hunger requires a true break with the status quo. It will not happen in the course of “business as usual.” To resolve humanity’s oldest and most pernicious problem requires four essential ingredients:

• Vision: What is critical to human progress is vision — seeing a future that can be achieved and is worth achieving. The vision that calls forth The Hunger Project is a sustainable future for humanity, a future in which all people have the opportunity to live healthy and productive lives in harmony with nature. We call this “the end of hunger.”
• Commitment: Commitment is what allows individuals to encounter obstacles, frustrations and failures on the pathway to achievement and still keep going. It is increasingly clear that achieving the future we envision will not just happen. It must be made to happen, and this will require extraordinary commitment. Calling forth that commitment, and keeping it focused and sustained to fulfill the vision, is a vital responsibility of The Hunger Project.
• Transformative Leadership: Leadership is critical to every great human achievement. Ending hunger requires a new kind of leadership at all levels of society — from the village to the district, state, nation and the international community. This is not top-down leadership in the traditional patriarchal, authority-based model. Instead, it must be leadership that reawakens people to their own power and selfhood, calls forth their vision and commitment, and mobilizes and empowers people to take effective action.
• A Comprehensive, Strategic Methodology: Mobilizing and empowering hungry people to transform the conditions that give rise to hunger and poverty requires a clear, focused, strategic methodology, rigorously applied over many years. It must be affordable, replicable and sustainable. To be relevant to the hundreds of thousands of villages where hunger persists, it must be a strategy that is led by local people themselves, not by a handful of outside experts.

Three Pillars of Bottom-up, Gender-focused Development

Our experience in pioneering strategies based on these principles has taught us that there are three key elements that, when brought together, produce the sustainable end of hunger.

• Social mobilization for self-reliant action. The conditions of hunger and extreme poverty leave people in a deep sense of resignation. Focused and sustained strategic action is required to awaken people to the possibility of taking self-reliant action, build their confidence in their own abilities, and empower them to organize for effective action.
• Interventions for Gender Equality. Gender inequality is the fundamental root cause of most of the remaining hunger and extreme poverty in our world. Women in hungry countries bear almost the entire responsibility for meeting basic needs, yet are systematically denied the resources, freedom of action and voice in decision-making to fulfill that responsibility. The Hunger Project’s highest priority is to identify and implement high-leverage strategic interventions in each cultural setting to catalyze the profound transformation in gender relations that is essential to achieving the end of hunger.
• Making Local Government Work. Issues of health, education, nutrition and family incomes are local problems and can only be effectively resolved locally. Local government bodies, such as village and district councils, are the only society-wide institutions through which people can work together to meet basic needs. The Hunger Project works in partnership with local people to ensure that local government includes the leadership of women; is directly accountable to local people; gains access to resources, information and decision-making authority - and is effective at getting the job done.

A Global Movement for the End of Hunger and Poverty

• Global responsibility, partnership and investment: A child who goes hungry is not an Ethiopian or a Bangladeshi, but a human being. Every one of us is diminished by hunger, and each of us can take responsibility for ending it: if we are villagers, by finding the courage to send our daughters to school; if we are in the developed world, by investing our financial resources at a level that truly expresses our authentic partnership.
• A movement, not an organization: The Hunger Project can never be accurately thought of as merely an organization. It must be thought of as a movement, a campaign of individuals and organizations committed to taking strategic action to mobilize self-reliant development and transform the policy environment at every level so that people can succeed.
• Replicate the methodology for empowerment, not the “solution.”  One of the failures of development has been the belief that the way to end hunger is to find a workable solution and replicate it. This fails because the source of the success is the human creativity that resulted in the solution, not the solution itself. Ending hunger is achieved by replicating the process of human empowerment, not by finding a development model that works and replicating it.
• A Common Front. In every village where hunger persists, human beings must be empowered to discover their own vision, express their own leadership, create their own solutions and work together to achieve their own success. At every level of society, the commitment of government officers, researchers, journalists, business people and citizen activists must be mobilized into a common front, transforming policies and structures so that all people have the chance to lead healthy and productive lives.
• Being a catalyst in the worldwide movement to end hunger and extreme poverty is perhaps the greatest opportunity of this generation. From this perspective, one discovers that ending hunger is not fundamentally a problem to be solved, but a profound opportunity for unleashing the human spirit.