Global Hunger Index

Created in 2006, the GHI was initially published by the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Germany-based Welthungerhilfe.

Gender inequality, hunger, and climate change converge in ways that place households, communities, and countries under extreme stress.

Working toward gender justice entails recognizing people’s various needs, vulnerabilities, and opportunities; redistributing resources and labor equitably; and ensuring women’s participating and representation in decision-making processes.

Africa South of the Sahara’s high GHI score is driven by the highest undernourishment and child mortality rates of any region by far.

A small number of countries—including Bangladesh, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nepal, Somalia, and Togo—have made significant improvements in their GHI scores, even if hunger in these countries remains too high.

Women and girls are typically hardest hit by food insecurity and malnutrition as well as by the effects of weather extremes and climate emergencies.

Recognition entails transforming gender discriminatory norms by acknowledging that different groups of people have different needs, vulnerabilities, and opportunities and that their physical location and social position can intersect to intensify injustices.

When policymakers lack understanding of the links between gender relations, food systems transformation, and climate policies as well as gender-disaggregated data, they operate in a context of uncertainty that may invite unintended consequences.

These barriers—as well as the challenges of climate change, land degradation, exposure to risks, difficult or precarious working conditions, and low social recognition—have turned many young people away from agricultural and rural livelihoods.

Although youth are underrepresented in policy- and decision- making related to food systems, they have a legitimate interest in shaping their future, and their voices must be heard.

Forty- two percent of the world's people are under 25 years of age, and the global population of adolescents and young adults, at 1.2 billion, is the largest in history.

The GHI emphasizes that the international community urgently needs to respond to the escalating humanitarian crises - while not losing sight of the need for long-term transformation of food systems.

The GHI 2022 focuses on the way communities, local governments, and civil actors engage with each other to make decisions and allocate resources is key to improving the food situation for people, and especially for the most vulnerable ones.

Yet in several countries, civic spaces are subject to increasing repression, hindering citizens from claiming and realizing their right to adequate food.

Encouragingly, it points out that examples of empowerment are as visible in fragile contexts with high levels of societal fractionalization as they are in more stable settings with longer traditions of local democracy.

In summary, the GHI emphasizes that motivated and inclusive governance at all levels that ensure citizens' participation, action, and oversight is pivotal for meaningful food system transformation that ultimately benefits all people, especially the most vulnerable.

[20] In their essay, guest authors Dan Smith and Caroline Delgado describe how, despite the devastating COVID-19 pandemic, violent conflicts continued to be the main cause of global hunger in 2020.

Violent conflict affects nearly all aspects of a food system, from production, harvesting, processing, and transport to commodity supply, financing, marketing, and consumption.

By working collaboratively, involved actors—from states and community groups to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and United Nations agencies—can build a foundation for food security and sustainable peace.

Finally, the 2021 GHI calls for a more vigorous approach to addressing conflicts at the political level and prosecuting those who use hunger as a weapon of war.

The 2019 GHI report notes that climate change is making it ever more difficult to adequately and sustainably feed and nourish the human population.

Individual and collective values and behaviors must push toward sustainability and a fairer balance of political, cultural, and institutional power in society.

The essay in the 2018 GHI report examines forced migration and hunger—two closely intertwined challenges that affect some of the poorest and most conflict-ridden regions of the world.

The 2017 highlights the uneven nature of progress made in reducing hunger worldwide and the ways in which inequalities of power lead to unequal nourishment.

Reasons include an unbalanced diet, a higher need for micronutrients (e.g. during pregnancy or while breast feeding) but also health issues related to sickness, infections or parasites.

The consequences for individuals can be devastating: these often include mental impairment, bad health, low productivity and death caused by sickness.

In addition to the direct measures described above, this includes the education and empowerment of women, the creation of better sanitation and adequate hygiene, and access to clean drinking water and health services.

For them, a sickness in the family, crop failure after a drought, or the interruption of remittances from relatives who live abroad can set in motion a downward spiral from which they cannot free themselves on their own.

The lower the intensity of the crises, the less resources have to be used to cope with the consequences: Based on this analysis, the authors present several policy recommendations: Increasingly, hunger is related to how we use land, water, and energy.

The evidence presented in the report[23][24] shows that the window of opportunity for improving nutrition spans is the 1,000 days between conception and a child's second birthday (that is the period from -9 to +24 months).