This year Action Against Hunger responded to several major humanitarian crises, from conflict-related emergencies in Ukraine and Gaza to cyclones in Madagascar, the devastating earthquake in Turkey, and complex emergencies where crises including armed conflict, disease, and climate disasters combine to put the population at risk of hunger, such as in Ethiopia and Afghanistan.
Our membership of the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) enabled us to work in partnership in some of these settings, and to receive £4.6 million in DEC funding to support our emergency response. This year we also received £14.7 million from the UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO).
Action Against Hunger UK continued to provide high-quality and holistic expertise on nutrition this year. In the UK we advocated for the prevention of malnutrition through increased aid for nutrition and provided evidence in the battle to push hunger and its causes further up the agenda in the UK Government’s new White Paper on International Development.
Our nine-year partnership with the Innocent Foundation to promote the use of community health workers to diagnose and treat severe acute malnutrition culminated in the World Health Organisation updating its global guidelines on the management of wasting and nutritional oedema – a tremendous endorsement of our work.
Meanwhile, the UK aid budget maintained at 0.5% of GNI this year, and the global cost-of-living crisis meant food poverty in the UK required more of our attention. To this end, we built on existing partnerships with local organisations and continued to work towards scaling-up much-needed food pantries in London and Somerset.
Against this backdrop of financial pressure, Action Against Hunger’s private fundraising nonetheless did exceptionally well this year, with the Love Food Give Food campaign raising an amazing £373,000 from 167 restaurants, and the Fine Wine and Art auction dinner seeing its second-most successful event in its 17-year history, raising a fantastic £461,000 in unrestricted income. We also successfully recruited over 4,329 new individual donors. We must also thank players of People’s Postcode Lottery for continuing to be long-standing allies and donating a very generous £1 million for our fight against hunger.
This year, for example, in the Central African Republic (and with FCDO support) we helped reduce premature death and illness from hunger. This shows that while tackling life-threatening hunger and malnutrition is an onerous task, it can be done. We’re proud of achievements in 2023, and are also proud to present this report, which gives a snapshot of our year.
