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Creating Sustainable Solutions to End Hunger: It Starts With a Meal™ and Ends With Self-Reliance

on  October 19, 2023

For 25 years, Rise Against Hunger has been supporting rural, last-mile communities in our work to alleviate food insecurity around the world. If you’ve participated in one of our meal packaging events before, you might know that we ship nutritious meals globally as a means to provide immediate support for communities experiencing hunger. In addition to addressing immediate needs, we also support long-term sustainable solutions to ending hunger. Rise Against Hunger works with community-based organizations to develop sustainable agriculture and income-generation programs that address the root causes of hunger and aim to establish long-term solutions. Through our Empowering Communities pathway, Rise Against Hunger works with local organizations through project grants, technical training and behavior change workshops, all of which promote empowerment and strengthen the capacity of local organizations to mitigate hunger through community-based solutions. The Empowering Communities agriculture and income-generation programs give local organizations autonomy to implement food security programs based on the needs of the communities they serve, and Rise Against Hunger comes alongside these organizations as they tackle these challenges. 

A facilitation workshop is conducted in Malawi as part of Harvesting Prosperity and Resilience, the sustainable agriculture project Rise Against Hunger implements with in-country partner FOCUS.
The sustainability of these projects is of vital importance to us; our goal is to ensure lasting, long-term impact in the communities served. Therefore, Rise Against Hunger focuses on capacity strengthening rooted in knowledge building and knowledge cascading throughout the projects. We work with local organizations through the facilitation of Training of Trainers programs, technical guide development and collaborative learning workshops. Each of these activities helps local organizations strengthen their skills in agriculture, nutrition, program management, and monitoring and evaluation. This, in turn, strengthens the programming that they implement at a community level by increasing capacity in program implementation. The Elevating Women and Youth Farmers project in Mali, one of our Empowering Communities projects, is working to increase access to land and livestock and knowledge of climate-smart agriculture techniques among women and youth farmers in Mali’s Sikasso and Segou regions. To support capacity strengthening that will then enable sustainable, long-term impact, Rise Against Hunger facilitated a Training of Trainers workshop in Mali with AMEDD, our local partner, in January 2023 to bolster knowledge and skills associated with integrating gardening concepts and technical nutrition practices. The purpose of the training was to work with key project stakeholders in building their knowledge of integrated concepts to improve understanding of the connection between agriculture and nutrition. 
Participants work together in Training of Trainers workshop in Mali
Participants work together in Training of Trainers workshop in Mali.
After the workshop, these stakeholders went on to apply the learned practices within the communities and train project participants, creating a ripple effect of change through the creation of keyhole gardens, improved methods to monitor malnutrition within households and the promotion of nutritious, local recipes that use garden vegetables and other indigenous crops. By empowering local stakeholders with knowledge that could be shared with project participants, the workshop strengthened the impact of the project.  In addition to training workshops, in September 2023, Rise Against Hunger hosted a Collaborative Learning Agenda that brought together impact partners across 17 countries to share successes and challenges associated with the food security programs implemented with Rise Against Hunger. The learning agenda was an opportunity for impact partners to share and learn from each other, fostering a collaborative network for the implementing organizations. This promotes sustainability because the organizations are able to connect, collaborate, problem-solve and teach new practices, all of which perpetuate and reinforce learnings that strengthen organizational capacity.  
Crops being grown as part of the Empowering Leaders Through Nutrition-Smart Agriculture project in South Sudan.
Rise Against Hunger also prioritizes long-term sustainability when working with partners on the design and implementation of food security programs. In South Sudan, Rise Against Hunger has been working with Lift Up the Vulnerable at Hope For South Sudan, an orphanage and school in the Eastern Equatoria state. Hope for South Sudan previously received Rise Against Hunger meals but wanted to become more self-reliant. The project implemented at the school, called Empowering Leaders Through Nutrition-Smart Agriculture, has supported this objective through sustainable agriculture solutions. Hope for South Sudan is now cultivating a 200-acre farm that provides fresh fruits, vegetables and grains for school meals. In addition to farm cultivation, Hope For South Sudan has learned how to develop an on-campus malnutrition monitoring and referral program that has empowered school officials to identify and address cases of moderate malnutrition on campus. This has prevented malnutrition cases from worsening before children are able to receive treatment. With a steady production of farm produce, Hope For South Sudan is identifying opportunities to generate income from farm activities to cover costs of farm operations. This promotes sustainability as the school makes progress toward self-reliance.  Robust food security programs empower communities to address and overcome causes of food insecurity, which is why Rise Against Hunger prioritizes long-term, sustainable solutions in our programs with our partners. The work to end hunger starts with a meal — but it doesn’t stop there. Ending hunger also requires communities to be empowered through self-reliance. When communities are empowered with skills and resources, they are able to achieve this, escape instances of food insecurity, maintain food security and mitigate their dependence on food assistance.To learn more about how we work, check out our organization’s model here. 

About the Author

Bryan Pride is the Director of Technical Programs on Rise Against Hunger's Global Impact team.

More Posts by Bryan Pride

Strength, Stability And Hope

The gift that filled Nelly’s table.

“We were yielding very little, and the crops could not sustain us the whole year,” Nelly remembers. As a mother of seven and a farmer with two decades of experience, the stress of inconsistent yields was all-consuming. A poor harvest not only strained her family financially, but also limited their own meals to just two a day. Their story reflects that of many in their fishing and farming village near a lake in the Karonga district of northern Malawi. Here, heavy rainfall makes conventional farming methods nearly impossible. The entire village is, quite literally, saturated in food insecurity — a reality that leaves families struggling to survive season after season without a dependable source of nourishment.

In 2019, Nelly began participating in Harvesting Prosperity and Resilience, a sustainable agriculture project implemented by Rise Against Hunger in partnership with the Foundation for Community Support Services (FOCUS). The project works with 3,100 smallholder farmers in Malawi’s Karonga and Mzimba districts to strengthen food and nutrition security by improving production methods, nutrition practices and household income.

Just one year later, Nelly was ready to expand the variety of crops on her farm. What land once only produced maize began to flourish with sesame, cowpeas, rice and groundnuts during the rainy season (summer), as well as maize and vegetables during the dry season (winter). Through climate-smart agriculture training, she learned new techniques like manure making, pit planting and mulching, crop rotation and intercropping. Equipped with these tools, Nelly’s farm began to thrive.

After the 2023–2024 growing season, she sold enough produce to purchase an ox cart. Her harvests in 2024-2025 season yielded over 500 pounds of crops, including 22 bags of groundnuts, seven bags of maize, 12 tins of sesame and three bags of rice. With this surplus, she was able to invest in a motorbike, which she now uses to transport African doughnuts (mandasi) that she cooks and sells — creating yet another source of income for her family.

The transformation reaches far beyond her finances. Nelly now has the stability to provide for her husband and children. “I am able to eat different food types, pay school fees for my children and fulfill the visions that I have made with my family,” she beams. “I am now sleeping peacefully without any fears of food or paying school fees for the children.”

Her leadership has also grown. Today, Nelly serves as a leader in the Harvesting Prosperity and Resilience project, teaching other farmers in her district to adopt climate-resilient, labor-saving practices. By sharing her knowledge, she is multiplying her impact — empowering her neighbors to experience the same transformation she has achieved.

Across Nelly’s community, food and economic security are on the rise. Lombani, a government extension officer for the region, explains, “I can see the community is being transformed in the sense that in the area, there is food, income and nutrition security. Development is also happening at the household level.”

Nelly reflects on what it means to invest in holistic programs that address the root causes of hunger: “We are now healthy people. Children are going to school after eating their breakfast, having high yields and different types of crops due to conservation agriculture practices. With the support from the project, we have food, and we can access other food items from the market after selling our produce.”

This is the gift that fills: a future full of stability, strength and hope. It fills tables with food, families with security and communities with the resources to thrive. It’s an investment in futures rooted in resilience and hope.