About us
Why we are here
Every person has a right to nutrition. Malnutrition, in all its forms, is a violation of that right. Our work is to address the triple burden of it: undernutrition, both stunting and wasting; deficiencies in vitamins and other micronutrients; and overweight, obesity and diet-related disease.
Our vision
A world where all children, adolescents, women and men realise their right to holistic nutrition.
Our mission
To provide, protect and promote diets, services and practices that support optimal nutrition, growth and development for all, especially within vulnerable populations.
Our objective
Build resilient, food-secure communities. Improve nutrition for all ages. Advocate for strong nutrition policies.
48 years
We are specialists in malnutrition
Operation Hunger has not only shown concern but taken action, using nutrition equity to address the burden of malnutrition. We pinpoint and prioritise the interventions that move a community furthest.
48
years alongside communities
239
communities reached
2.4m
lives touched
9
provinces
Nutrition equity
Six things we are trying to change
A person's nutrition is decided at different moments of their life, and each one needs its own answer.
The first five years
Preventing every form of malnutrition before a child turns five: stunting, wasting, micronutrient deficiency and overweight alike.
Five to nineteen
Nutrition through middle childhood and adolescence, when a missed meal costs a school year rather than a day.
The first thousand days
Maternal nutrition through pregnancy and breastfeeding, and preventing low birth weight in newborns.
Children already wasting
Finding it early and treating it, through community-based care linked to the clinics that can follow up.
Partnerships and governance
Better data, better advocacy and better financing, because no single organisation ends hunger by itself.
The whole food system
Working with health, water and sanitation, education and social protection rather than around them.
How we work
Six principles behind every programme
- Gender-responsive
- Women make most decisions about what a household eats, and are most often the ones who go without. We back that decision-making power, and we bring men into feeding and care rather than around them.
- Equity-focused
- Malnutrition in all its forms is concentrated among the poorest and most marginalised. Reducing that gap is right in principle and it is also what works.
- Systems-centered
- Hunger is not a shortage of food. It is what happens where food, health, water, education and income systems fail at the same time.
- Context-specific
- What a community in Limpopo needs is not what a community in the Cape Flats needs. We assess first and design second.
- Evidence-informed
- We measure nutritional status before and after, and we publish what the numbers say even when they are not the numbers we hoped for.
- Rights-based
- Guided by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women of 1979, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989.
The bigger picture
Ten of the Sustainable Development Goals
Our programmes are designed against these, because hunger is never only about food.
- 02 Zero hunger
- 03 Good health and wellbeing
- 04 Quality education
- 05 Gender equality
- 06 Clean water and sanitation
- 08 Decent work and economic growth
- 09 Industry, innovation and infrastructure
- 11 Sustainable cities and communities
- 12 Responsible consumption and production
- 13 Climate action
Relief is the bridge. Equity is the destination.
R200 is a family food parcel. It is also the first step of a five-phase road that ends with a household feeding itself.