Since the late 2000s, a strategic rethink has
seen the World Food Programme (WFP)
shift from the concept of food aid to that
of food assistance.
While food aid is a tried and tested model,
proudly woven into WFP history, it sprang from
a largely unidirectional, top-down vision:
people were hungry; we fed them.
Food assistance, by contrast,
involves a more complex understanding of
people’s long-term nutritional needs and of
the diverse approaches required to meet
them. This conceptual shift has been at the core
of WFP’s transformation in recent years.
While we remain the world’s leading
humanitarian agency, we have evolved to
combine frontline action with the quest for
durable solutions.
This shift is about recognizing that hunger
does not occur in a vacuum. It means we must
concentrate time, resources and efforts on the
most vulnerable in society. It implies not
just emergency interventions, but tailored,
multi-year support programmes designed to lift
a whole nation’s nutritional indicators. We
balance the urgency to alleviate hunger here
and now with the broader objective of ending
hunger once and for all.
Food assistance thus becomes part of a
policy mix that advances social wellbeing
in general. In line with the
Sustainable Development Goals, and in particular with
Goal 2, we consider the quality as well as the
quantity of food, with the emphasis on its
nutritious character and seasonality.
Crucially, food assistance enlists
beneficiaries as actors: it gives them a
voice, and, wherever possible, a choice in
what food they receive and how they receive
it.
This last principle has been steadily
gaining prominence. And it helps explain why
over the last decade, in-kind food
assistance (the only type there was until
the mid-2000s) has partly given way to
cash-based transfers.
“Cash” for WFP involves physical bank notes,
vouchers, or electronic funds being given to
beneficiaries to spend directly. Empowering
people to meet their essential needs is a
long-haul process. Cash now represents over
a third of WFP assistance, with an estimated
US$2.8 billion transferred in 2023. With its
benefits of flexibility, efficiency and
beneficiary choice, cash is growing rapidly
within our hunger-fighting portfolio. In
fact, both cash and in-kind are likely to
co-exist for the foreseeable future, with
WFP increasingly adept at using them singly,
alternately or jointly in any given setting.
