How we work
Relief is the bridge. Equity is the destination.
Every community we work in follows the same five phases, and every phase is measured. It is a slow model and a deliberately unglamorous one: the point is not how much food we hand out, it is how quickly a community stops needing us to.
The implementation model
Five phases, in order
A community enters at phase one and leaves after phase five. Each phase has its own activities, its own outcomes and its own dates, and every project page on this site shows exactly which phase that community has reached.
-
We start by measuring. Screening children, surveying households and sitting down with the community tells us which barriers to a decent diet are actually in the way here — and gives us a baseline to measure everything that follows against.
What we do
- Anthropometric screening
- Nutrition surveillance
- Nutritional risk screening
- Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool (MUST)
- Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) assessment
- Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS)
What the community gains
- Malnutrition Index Profile
- Early detection and prevention
- Vulnerability stratification
- Priority targeting
- Evidence-informed programming
- Auditable monitoring and evaluation
- Community agency literacy
-
Food, now, while the longer work begins. Soup kitchens, household distributions, parcels through early childhood centres. Relief is not a solution and we do not pretend it is; it is what keeps a household standing long enough for one to take hold.
What we do
- Community broad-based feeding support
- Early childhood development centre feeding
- Surplus food recovery and redistribution
What the community gains
- Nutritional stabilisation and dietary adequacy
- Growth and health protection
- Maternal and child protection
- Protective care environments
- Vulnerability reduction
-
Land, water, seed and skills. A community garden, irrigation, and the small enterprises that grow around them turn food that arrives on a truck into food the community produces and sells itself.
What we do
- Identified agricultural site
- Biodiverse community garden established
- Water access and irrigation
- Complementary rural enterprise establishment
What the community gains
- Local food production capacity
- Income generation
- Reduced dependency on external supply
-
Knowledge that stays when we leave. Nutrition and hygiene, but also how to run a survey and manage a project, so the community can coordinate and sustain the work without us standing next to it.
What we do
- Health and nutrition campaign
- Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH)
- Nutrition education
- Project management and survey training
What the community gains
- Informed food choices
- Sustainable feeding practices
- Sustainable behavioural change
- Improved hygiene practices
- Heightened health awareness
- Technical health literacy
-
We step back. The garden is theirs, the governance is theirs, the records are theirs. Success is a community that no longer needs Operation Hunger, and that can say so with numbers.
What we do
- Sustainable gardening
- Environmental advocacy
- Clinical hygiene initiatives
What the community gains
- Self-sustaining local food system
- Community-owned governance
- Lasting nutrition security
The thinking behind it
The Malnutrition Determinants framework
Everyone deserves access to healthy, affordable food and quality nutrition care. What stands in the way is rarely the food itself: it is the deeper inequities produced by systems and processes that shape how people live every day.
The framework holds that nutrition outcomes are the product of people's social, psychological and material circumstances meeting their wider environment. It has guided our programme design for decades, and it is the reason we assess a community before we design anything for it.
-
Immediate determinants
What acts on a person directly
- Dietary intake
- Health status
- Care and feeding practices
-
Underlying determinants
The household and the community around them
- Household food security
- Water, sanitation and hygiene
- Access to health services
- Caregiver time, knowledge and health
-
Enabling determinants
The systems that set the terms
- The food system
- Income and social protection
- Education
- Governance, policy and financing
What good nutrition produces
Survival. Growth. Development. Performance at school and at work. Economic wellbeing. These are the outcomes the layers above either enable or prevent, and they are what a nutrition programme is actually buying.
Highlight 1
The triple burden
Malnutrition is no longer only hunger. It shows up as undernutrition — stunting and wasting — as deficiencies in vitamins and micronutrients, and as overweight and obesity. These coexist in the same community, often in the same household, and all three are driven by poor diets, thin care practices and health services that are not there.
Highlight 2
The whole picture
The framework lays out the immediate, underlying and enabling determinants of nutrition, and how they act on each other both vertically and horizontally. That matters because it names what improving nutrition actually buys: survival, growth, development, performance at school and work, and economic wellbeing.
Highlight 3
Where the money should go
It is also a budgeting tool. By identifying cost drivers and resource requirements against each determinant, it shows which intervention moves a given community furthest per rand — which is how we choose what to do first.
Why a systems response
Food alone has never been enough
The changing face of child malnutrition needs a response that delivers diets, services and practices together, at every stage of life. The food system does the heavy lifting, but only alongside health, water and sanitation, education and social protection.
Zero hunger
End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture.
United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 2
Good health and wellbeing
Ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all, at all ages.
United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3
Gender equality
Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.
United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5
Follow the journey. Track the progress. Fuel the next phase.
Every community page shows which phase it has reached, what was done, and what it cost. A monthly gift is what moves one from phase two to phase three.