- Self-reliant epicentres: Ten epicentres across five of our African countries celebrated achieving all the criteria to demonstrate their ability to successfully drive their own development in all key sectors.
- A Growing Movement: Our Movement for Community-led Development grew from 18 to 38 member organizations with activities in 92 countries. The movement was presented to the World Bank, USAID, the UN and IFPRI, and established chapters in Malawi, the UK, and the Netherlands and began the process in Haiti. A priority for the movement is sharing best practices to expand the community-led model: The Hunger Project-India works with the Bhutan Network for Empowering Women (BNEW) to empower women in the local governance system.
- Restoring the Environment: The Hunger Project-Ethiopia was awarded our first-ever grant to integrate reforestation into our epicentre strategy. WeForest is partnering with The Hunger Project to tackle environmental threats and promote the resilience of local people through tree planting. The partnership gives community partners ownership, leverages local knowledge and enhances environmental stewardship capacity.
- Youth and Gender: Our Washington colleague Mary Kate Costello was named to the UN’s Youth and Gender working group, and was flown by the UN to Indonesia to stress the importance of investing in young women’s cooperatives. Sweden’s Girl Platform (Flicka) organized unprecedented THP participation in Women Deliver bringing 14 staff from nine countries, as well as hosting a high-level reception during the UN Commission on the Status of Women. We also partnered with Her Choice—an alliance of organizations that are working to halt child marriage in 11 countries, and our work is well underway to deepen our impact to end child marriage in the communities where we work.
- Peace Treaties in Bangladesh: In a nation wracked by partisan violence, Badiul Majumdar has succeeded in having the three major political parties in 11 sub-districts sign codes of conduct to eschew violence and cooperate to halt violent extremism.
- National Strategic Plans: Building on our global strategic plan for 2016-2020, each Hunger Project country developed its national strategy to deepen our impact and take it to a transformative scale. Each country presented its strategy on global webinars. We established an online progress tracking system for the plans.
- Major New Funders: The Hunger Project-Mexico received our first-ever grant from the European Union, and The Hunger Project-India received its first grant via DASRA, the clearinghouse for corporate social investment.
- Learning Organization: The Hunger Project renewed its commitment to strengthening our practices as a learning organization. A department name change to “Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) reflected Our MEL department’s leadership for “Data for the People” was featured at the American Evaluation Association conference.
- New Policies in the US: We participated in the passage of key legislation to firmly establish reforms in the US government’s Global Food Security Strategy and aid transparency. Empowerment of communities is also now a priority for USAID for the first time in 20 years.
- Partnership in Malawi: Following epicentre visits by a Parliamentary Committee and the Minister, The Hunger Project and Malawi’s Ministry of local government and rural development signed an agreement to integrate Malawi’s rural development policy and our epicentre strategy, and to work with the Malawi Chapter of the Movement for Community-led Development to go to national scale.
Article courtesy of The Hunger Project’s, Global Executive Vice President, John Coonrod on December 21, 2016.