Our Sectors
Food Security
In 2009, the number of undernourished people reached an historic high of over one billion people worldwide. Higher food prices and increasing climate change impacts have added an additional burden on the poor and have contributed to an increasing number of people unable to access sufficient food to meet daily nutritional needs.
CHF designs projects to address food insecurity in rural areas where the poor have limited access to resources to improve their food situation. Often dependent on the weather for survival, the rural poor are particularly vulnerable to drought, grasshopper invasion, and other calamities. With little assets and productive inputs, and largely using suboptimal agricultural techniques, people in food-insecure communities find it difficult to cope with the stresses imposed by nature and have a hard time developing their resilience to shocks.
CHF’s approach to food insecurity promotes the empowerment of communities and households to increase resilience and self-reliance. We work with our beneficiaries to:
- Increase their asset base
- Improve their agricultural production and productivity
- Introduce new crops that are better adapted to the climate
- Build better wells and water catchment systems
- Increase access to markets and credit
- Start off-farm income generating activities, etc.
To ensure the sustainability of our interventions, we use the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA), which provides the framework to analyze the food security situation based on households and communities’ assets, aspirations and capacity to sustain change.
Examples of CHF Food Security projects:
Since the hard-hitting drought of 2003, CHF has been involved in the implementation of the Partnership for Food Security project in Ethiopia. The project focuses on long-term sustainable development to improve food security and strengthen the capacity of communities to cope with shocks and stresses. CHF assists individuals to break the chronic dependency on food aid and to become self-reliant through increasing agricultural productivity, managing and conserving natural resources, diversifying income, and improving disaster prevention and management capacity.
In Northern Ghana, CHF designed and implemented the Household Food Security project from 2000 to 2006. Aiming to provide solutions to food insecurity, the project introduced new income-generating activities and innovative food crop production techniques. The project also facilitated interactions between rural communities, research institutions and extension services.
