Right now, a major donor is matching all donations up to $60,000 for WOW’s Emergency Hunger Response in Malawi. A $50 donation will be matched to $100 and can provide 42 children with a daily meal for an entire month! Call 1-866-664-4673 or click here today!

Boy Malawi

You may or may not have heard about the extreme famine ravaging Malawi. Terms like food food insecurity, hunger gap, and food crisis are labels often used by news agencies and acting organizations responding to the emergency. We hear them a lot, but what do they mean?The definitions coincide. Food insecurity is a situation in which a community or region lacks adequate income, assets, and/or resources at the household level. Due to this, people have little to no access to basic needs. Lack of access to resources results in chronic food insecurity, meaning it is continual and cannot be overcome by food aid interventions (FAO, 1997). A hunger gap is when households have eaten the food from the previous growing season and are waiting to harvest their next round of crops. A food crisis is when these two situations occur simultaneously. It is often an unexpected hazard, such as extreme weather patterns, that pushes a food scarce nation into such a state. The rate of hunger and malnutrition rapidly increase in the region (Timmer C., NCBI, 2010). A food crisis intensifies the already dire situation of a food insecure nation.

This is where Malawian communities find themselves. Facing one of the worst food crises in a decade. Malawi is a food insecure nation and they are currently in a hunger gap. This gap has been exacerbated due to El Nino which produced an extreme change in weather patterns. The change in weather resulted in the loss of of last years harvest, flooding destroyed food reserves and fertile land. Any crops that did survive later died in the intense drought that followed. Throwing Malawi into one of the worst Food Crises they have seen. (World Food Program, 2015).

The result has been devastating. Malawi being 18th least developed country in the world, its population is extremely vulnerable. Survival, especially for the poorest communities, has become increasingly difficult as undernourishment is overwhelming the region.

The good news is that this crisis is not going unoticed. There are many agencies on the ground responding the the immense need. WOW is acting too. Through food aid, food security initiatives and sustainability projects WOW is serving some of the most vulnerable people in the world at one of their greatest times of need.