Frequently Asked Questions

"End Hunger: Walk the World" is an annual event to raise money and awareness for the World Food Programme’s (WFP) efforts to fight child hunger and malnutrition. During 24 hours walks will be organised all over the world, thereby bringing together people from all parts of the globe in the fight against hunger.

All over the world! We walk in all time zones, which means that we’ll be walking for 24 hours and covering the entire world. Find a walk near you and join us

Walk the World is a joint effort of WFP and its corporate partners, led by TNT, Unilever and DSM. Employees from these companies walk with WFP Goodwill Ambassadors, staff, and beneficiaries as well as government and NGO partners to show their solidarity in the fight against hunger and malnutrition. 

You can help by joining a walk near you, thereby increasing visibility of the event. Or you can donate money and support our school meals programme. Last, but not least, you can help by spreading the word about this global event. You can visit us online on facebook, twitter, youtube and flickr.

Your donation will support our global school meals programmes. WFP’s vision for this programme is to reduce hunger among school children so that hunger is not an obstacle to their development. Learn more about WFP’s school meals programme

WFP’s administrative costs are only seven percent, which means that 93 percent will go to feed hungry school children where the need is greatest.

WFP cannot fight global hunger and poverty alone. Therefore, we seek additional funding and valuable expertise from private companies active in areas such as transport, food, information and communications technology, logistics, finance and human resources. The idea behind Walk the World originates from one of WFP’s logistical partners, TNT. It is therefore natural that our partners are involved in this global event to secure visibility and the highest possible number of participants across the globe.

WFP’s school meals programme entails three elements:

In-school meals are one way in which the programmes operate. Children are fed breakfast, lunch or both in

school. These meals can be prepared in schools, in the community or be delivered from centralized kitchens.

Some in-school meal programmes provide complete meals, while others provide high energy biscuits or

snacks.

Take-home rations are another element of some school meal programmes. In this scheme, entire families

receive food if their children attend school. The rations are conditional upon school enrolment and

attendance of children. In some countries, in-school meals are combined with take-home rations for

particularly vulnerable students such as girls or orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs) to generate

greater impacts on school enrolment, retention rates, cognitive capacity, and nutrition. Food rations function

like conditional cash transfers, their value compensating for the costs of sending the child to school. This is also proven to be a powerful human rights programme for girls, increasing enrollment and attendance even in societies where girls are traditionally denied an education.

·         To the maximum extent possible, food is procured locally in developing countries, which in turn benefits local development efforts and small farmers.

Read more at: http://www.wfp.org/school-meals 

Absolutely! You can visit and join us online on :

- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/WalkTheWorld

- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Walk_the_World

- Youtube:  http://www.youtube.com/user/WORLDFOODPROGRAM

- and Flickr : http://www.flickr.com/photos/walk_the_world

You can always help the cause! You can find lots of ideas on http://www.wfp.org/get-involved. Either by donating, uploading your photo to our wall, or by spreading the word through facebook, twitter, youtube, flickr or other channels. Thank you for your support!

The World Food Programme (WFP) is the United Nations frontline agency mandated to combat global hunger, which afflicts one out of every six people on earth.

In emergencies, WFP is on the frontline, delivering food to save the lives of victims of war, civil conflict and natural disasters. After the cause of an emergency has passed, WFP uses food to help communities rebuild their shattered lives.

The vision of WFP is a world in which every man, woman and child has access at all times to the food needed for an active and healthy life. Without food, there can be no sustainable peace, no democracy and no development.

In November / December 1961, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the UN General Assembly adopted parallel resolutions establishing WFP. The three-year experimental programme was not due to enter into operation until January 1963. In reality it was up and running several months early, as an earthquake hit Iran, a hurricane swept through Thailand and newly independent Algeria was overwhelmed by five million returning refugees. Food assistance was needed urgently and WFP was tasked to supply it.

Since it was founded in 1963, WFP has fed more than 1.4 billion of the world's poorest people, and invested more than US$30 billion in development and emergency relief. Countries that previously relied on WFP food assistance but now no longer need it include Turkey, Vietnam and Mexico.

WFP employs roughly 10,200 staff, of whom 90 percent work in the field delivering food and monitoring its use.

No. There is enough food in the world today for everyone to have the nourishment necessary for a healthy and productive life.

The sensation of hunger, a lack of food in your stomach, is universal. But there are different manifestations of hunger which are each measured in different ways:

Under-nourishment is used to describe the status of people whose food intake does not include enough calories (energy) to meet minimum physiological needs for an active life. At present, there are above 1 billion undernourished people worldwide, most of them in developing countries.

Malnutrition means 'badly nourished', but is more than a measure of what we eat or fail to eat. Malnutrition is characterised by inadequate intake of protein, energy and micronutrients and by frequent infections and diseases. Starved of the right nutrition, people will die from common infections like measles or diarrhoea.
Malnutrition is measured not by how much food is eaten but by physical measurements of the body - weight or height - and age.

Wasting is an indicator of acute malnutrition that reflects a recent and severe process that has led to substantial weight loss. This is usually the result of starvation and/or disease.

Despite the impression you often get from the media, emergencies account for less than eight percent of hunger's victims. Few people realise that there are over 1 billion hungry people in the world who don't make the headlines -- more than the combined populations of the United States, Canada and the European Union. They are of all ages, from babies whose mothers cannot produce enough milk to the elderly with no relatives to care for them. They are the unemployed inhabitants of urban slums, the landless farmers tilling other people's fields, the orphans of AIDS and the sick, who need special or increased food intake to survive. Above all, children, women and rural communities are on the frontlines of hunger.

The percentage of hungry people is highest in east, central and southern Africa. Around three-quarters of undernourished people live in low-income rural areas of developing countries, principally in higher-risk farming areas. However, the share of the hungry in urban areas is rising. Of the total number of over 1 billion chronically hungry people, over half are in Asia and the Pacific and about a quarter are in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Whereas good progress was made in reducing chronic hunger in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, hunger has been slowly but steadily on the rise for the past decade, FAO said. The number of hungry people increased between 1995-97 and 2004-06 in all regions except Latin America and the Caribbean. But even in this region, gains in hunger reduction have been reversed as a result of high food prices and the global economic downturn that started in 2008. 

Today, one in seven people do not get enough food to be healthy and lead an active life, making hunger and malnutrition the number one risk to health worldwide -- greater than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.