Curing Hunger Through Business Fundamentals

In Indonesia, Action Against Hunger cured starvation by teaching accounting. No, we didn't expect our students to become CPAs. Instead, by recording and analyzing expenses and income from beneficiaries' livelihoods, we showed them how to discover costs that could be lowered as well as aspects of their businesses that were more profitable than others and worth expanding.

Regional conflict has sent rural villagers fleeing to safety in cities. There they often become merchants, usually selling food. They seldom examined their costs and profits, and sometimes those profits were so meager the merchants couldn't feed their families adequately. Our team trained the merchants to keep records of their cash flows, which illuminated where costs were high so the merchants could search for ways to lower the costs—and also where profits were largest, so the merchants could perhaps alter the mix of products they were selling or track seasonal shifts in demand so that they didn't overstock at times when customers were less interested or understock when demand swelled.

Our beneficiaries learned their lessons so well that they've been able to sustain their newfound prosperity and we were able to move on to communities with more urgent needs.

Fishing for Sustenance in Sudan

Throughout the world, Action Against Hunger sees its mission as finding sustainable solutions to ending hunger. Even in desperate emergencies, our concern is not simply feeding hungry beneficiaries, we also want to ensure they have the means to keep feeding themselves after we leave. Often this involves training beneficiaries in simple business techniques.

In southern Sudan, a peace agreement with the government encouraged refugees to return home. But too often, fighting had destroyed their villages, and returnees found few opportunities to support themselves. Among the solutions we offered returning Sudanese refugees were fishing cooperatives. We helped one group of beneficiaries, for example, organize the Toch Fishery Association. We provided the tools—nets, hooks, boats—that allowed the association's members to catch fish in local rivers, and we trained managers to coordinate the association's efforts either to sell the fish in a shop they ran or to distribute the catch among member's families. We also instituted a contribution of the cooperative's sales to a general fund for repairing or replacing equipment as it aged, became damaged, or fell irretrievably into the lake.

Because we taught the association's members basic business techniques, the members have been able to support themselves, maintain their businesses, and maximize their collective prosperity.

Farming Cooperatives Thrive in the Congo

Similarly, in Kivu, D.R. Congo, a fragile peace among government forces and diverse rebel groups brought refugees—as well as former soldiers—back to villages without clear means of support. So we created farming cooperatives, more than 100 of them, in fact. Here's our typical procedure.

First, we get villagers together to identify what they believe are their community's most pressing nutritional needs. Then, we examine the soil and climate to determine the proper mix of desirable procedure that will grow best in the environment without exhausting the soil's natural nutrients. Next, we show untrained farmers how to maximize yields, for example, by planting in rows rather than scattering seeds. And we explain how to use ecologically appropriate forms of biological pest control.

In Kivu, farmers are interested in planting crops they remember from before the fighting, but they're also intrigued by the potential of new produce. If farmers are unfamiliar with a species, we train them in its production and use. Soy beans, for example, are growing in popularity, so we explain how they can be used to make products as diverse as milk and flour.

Then, as elsewhere, we train members of farming cooperatives in business strategies, so they can collectively harvest, store and market their products to everyone's advantage. We explain a variety of options for organizing and running a business, and then we step aside so that members of each cooperative can decide the rules and regulations by which they'll operate.

Interestingly, in the Congo, farming cooperatives have formed their own associations to exchange useful agricultural and business insights as well as to lobby collectively for everyone's interests with the Ministry of Agriculture. Once we've given our beneficiaries basic business concepts, we’ve discovered, they’re able to develop the commercial potential of their businesses with little or no further prompting from us.

We believe that every community has the potential to be self-supporting. In the absence of natural or governmental impediments, communities that struggle to feed their members most often lack only knowledge. Each community may need different lessons depending on the immediate environment and social context, but the cliché is correct: Knowledge is power. Action Against Hunger’s most important mission is curing and feeding starving beneficiaries. And we prove repeatedly that lessons in ways to be self-supporting—known in humanitarian jargon as “capacity-building”—are pivotal ingredients of solutions that succeed.