AUGUST 22, 2000

Report to the Global Board of Directors

Joan Holmes, President

Executive Summary

The Hunger Project has made significant progress in a new era of its work – the era of the "Final Milestone" for the end of hunger – that we announced at the October 1999 Board meeting.

The Final Milestone in Ending Hunger

As background to this new era, we must understand the important progress that was made during the 1990s. To a great extent, the world now understands that ending hunger does not mean feeding people or delivering services to "beneficiaries" – it means giving people the opportunity they need to end their own hunger. Ending hunger means empowering hungry people to be the authors of their own development.

By the late 1990s, it was increasingly apparent that people-centered approaches to development – as essential as they are to ending hunger – are not the end of the story. To a large degree, the people who continue to be hungry not only lack opportunity to end their own hunger – society systematically denies them that opportunity.

Hungry people – and particularly women - live in an environment of traditional prejudices, unjust laws, corruption, broken promises, failed economic policies, and the severe subjugation of women. The inescapable conclusion is that people-centered approaches to ending hunger will only succeed when they are coupled with powerful strategies for social transformation. This is the hallmark of the Final Milestone for the end of hunger.

As we discussed in our last two meetings, strategies for social transformation must address two critical issues:

  1. Local democracy – ensuring that local people have the resources and the authority to manage programs to meet their basic needs.
  2. A fundamental transformation in gender relations – women need to be able to participate as full and equal partners in the process of development, and gain voice in the decisions that affect their lives.

During the last 18 months, The Hunger Project has focused on developing and launching new initiatives designed to catalyze the most high-leverage actions necessary to achieve breakthroughs in the two regions of the world where there is the most hunger: South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

The South Asia Initiative

As experts have noted, South Asia suffers the highest rates of childhood malnutrition in the world specifically because women in South Asia face the most severe subjugation, marginalization and disempowerment. Catalyzing a transformation in this condition is the greatest challenge of our work in the Final Milestone.

There is a special opportunity to meet the challenges of democracy and gender in South Asia. Recent legislation has extended democracy to rural villages and has mandated that 1/3 of elected representatives must be women. This opening comes at a time when there has been an awakening throughout South Asia. Women are awakening to a new possibility of true equality and participation in all aspects of development.

To address this challenge, The Hunger Project is committing itself to ignite and sustain a co-ordinated, strategic campaign of action to empower grassroots women as key change agents for a new future.

In both India and Bangladesh, this new initiative will be carried out in a four-prong strategy: Building alliances for advocacy and action, leadership skills training for grassroots action, increasing and improving media coverage and mobilizing international support.

In India, we focus on empowering women and panchayati raj – India’s system of local democracy. We are initially launching this new initiative in four states where there is strong support for panchayati raj. We have created a new Women’s Leadership Workshop to strengthen the leadership skills of newly elected members. The new workshop has already been pilot tested with women panchayat leaders in Karnataka, Gujarat and Rajasthan – and the graduates of this workshop are participating in "follow-up" meetings for mutual support and empowerment. A new national media strategy will be formally launched in India on Gandhi’s birthday, October 2nd, and I plan to travel to India in November to participate in meetings designed to strengthen the strategy, empower our new leaders and begin to call forth state-level alliances for advocacy and action.

In Bangladesh, where the system of local democracy is not yet as well developed, we are focusing on training and empowering as many women as possible as volunteer grassroots animators. Bangladesh has set a target of training 700 new woman animators this year, and is on target for surpassing this target. Many of these women animators are themselves elected representatives in their villages, and we are exploring the possibility of playing a large-scale role in the training of local government officials. In terms of advocacy, we have created a campaign to celebrate an annual National Girl Child Day – the first of which will be September 30th.

Our event on Saturday night, September 23rd, will be the formal international launching of this new initiative. Grassroots women leaders and government leaders from both India and Bangladesh will be with us for this celebration and for our deliberations on Sunday. Given the global importance of women’s full equality and participation in local democracy, this will be the topic of our discussion at the Board Meeting.

The African Woman Food Farmer Initiative

Last October we launched the first of our new initiatives for social transformation – the African Woman Food Farmer Initiative. This initiative focuses on economic empowerment: to make the African woman food farmer an economic player. It has a three-prong strategy: a mobilization campaign to awaken Africa and the international community to this issue, action on the ground to pioneer and demonstrate an effective methodology that enables women to gain access to the tools, credit and training they need, and advocacy – working in partnership with like-minded organizations both inside and outside Africa.

Dr. Fitigu Tadesse and Caroline Hossein (our new staff coordinator, see below) have visited four of the five countries where this initiative is underway, and report on the significant progress already being achieved.

The "on-the-ground" action of our African Woman Food Farmer Initiative is taking hold. More than 15,000 women in five countries have received credit, and are using it to improve their crops and their incomes.

As important as providing credit, is ensuring that African women develop the skills, rigor, discipline and organizational structures that are necessary to manage large-scale economic empowerment programs. The lack of this kind of organizational capacity is a major stumbling block to major funding agencies channeling more money into the hands of women farmers.

The advocacy thrust of the African Woman Food Farmer Initiative is making an enormous impact. The Africa Prize statue is traveling - like the Olympic Torch - from country to country and village to village. These torch events have generated tremendous press coverage, mass mobilization and participation by high-level government officials. Since our last meeting, the third and fourth of these events have been held – in Ghana and Senegal – and involved the heads of state of both nations.

Strategic Planning-in-Action

These new initiatives are building on the strength of our past decade of work in pioneering a new, dynamic, multisectoral, people-centered approach to development: Strategic Planning in Action.

The most exciting characteristic of this work around the world is the degree to which it is becoming a true people’s movement for self-reliance. Our process mobilizes people to take charge of their own lives: to strengthen their own leadership, set their own priorities, devise their own programs and mobilize their own resources.

A starting point, and a key to the success of this strategy in Bangladesh, Africa and Mexico is the Vision, Commitment and Action (VCA) workshop. Grassroots people are trained to lead this workshop as "animators" who facilitate the process of village development. In Bangladesh, advanced animators are being trained as "catalysts" for larger scale, hunger-free zone strategies.

In Africa, through the VCA workshop, The Hunger Project has more than doubled the number of villages in which it works in recent months. In Bangladesh, three volumes of "success stories" from hunger-free zones have been compiled.

This strategy is increasingly working in synergy with the new initiatives of the final milestone. For example, our SPIA program personnel are providing VCA workshops and literacy training to Africa Women Food Farmer Initiative villages in Africa. States in India are linking their SPIA efforts to work with women and panchayats.

Financial Strength

We officially launched this new era on January 20th of this year with the statement that The Hunger Project is the strongest it has ever been – and that we will need this strength given the challenges of this era. I’m pleased to say that we continue to grow stronger.

Based on our strong progress in fundraising in recent years, the Board approved an ambitious budget for the year 2000 – a budget that allows for a significant growth in programs and only a small projected surplus in income. Meeting this budget requires a new level of rigor and effectiveness in meeting both fund-raising and expenditure targets on a month-by-month basis. This has been achieved. Whereas most years see us dip significantly into our reserves during the first half of the year, we have not needed to do that this year.

In fund-raising, following several years of rapid increases in the total number of major donors (mostly at the lower levels), the strategy for this year has been to focus on higher-level pledges.

Expanding leadership and important transitions

Global Board

The strength of our Global Board grew at our last meeting in April. At that meeting, we were privileged to elect four new directors who bring expertise and influence in precisely the areas we are working.

At that meeting, Dr. Peter G. Bourne became the new chair of our board, as Dr. M. S. Swaminathan became our Chair Emeritus.

Global Staff

In our Global Office staff we have hired a new Senior Program Officer for our African Woman Food Farmer Initiative, Ms. Caroline Hossein. Caroline has a master’s degree and law degree, and served in the Peace Corps, working with women’s groups in Benin. Gabrielle Sasson has also joined our staff, bringing additional computer skills to our work in fund-raising.

Transition in India

As the Board knows, Lalita Banavali, our managing director in India since the start of our work there in 1984, will retire at the end of this year. As of January 1, 2001 our new country director for India will be Rita Sarin. Rita is a dynamic and highly committed individual with a solid track record of accomplishment, particularly in the empowerment of rural women. Most recently, she has worked for 12 years as a program officer with SIDA, establishing and supporting a network of 120 NGOs in 18 states working on the empowerment of women in panchayati raj. After her university and post-graduate training at the University of Chandigarh and University of Nottingham, she worked for six years at the Center for Women and Development Studies, living most of that period in villages.

Lalita Banavali will continue to bring her leadership to the work of The Hunger Project as Country Director Emeritus. In this volunteer capacity, she will devote her energies to high-level fund-raising both in India and abroad, as well serving as one of the leaders of our new Women's Leadership Workshop for strengthening the leadership skills of women panchayat members. As you know, Lalita has become an invaluable resource to our global movement.

Transition in Japan

We now have a new and officially recognized organization as our affiliate in Japan. Many members of the Board had the opportunity to meet Mr. Masahiro Konishi who serves as chair of the new Hunger Project in Japan. Mr. Konishi and his team received government recognition of their non-profit status in June, and launched their new organization at the prestigious Tokyo International Center on July 1. They have begun their work with a pledge of $300,000 from the distributors of Nu Skin Inc.