The World Food Programme (WFP)
Q1. How have the COVID-19 pandemic and the current food, energy and financing crises changed the priorities of your organization?
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) launched its new Strategic Plan (2022-2025) in 2022. WFP faces the challenge of a world that is not moving towards but away from zero hunger. Compounding the repercussions of shocks and stressors, structural vulnerabilities – deficits in key areas of development and unsustainable food systems – present major obstacles to reversing this trend. Organizational silos, disempowered communities and other constraints on accelerated action further exacerbate it. Moreover, the world’s costly response to the COVID-19 pandemic limits the resources available to expand and extend assistance and support to those furthest behind. Yet all is not lost; in addition to the opportunities that arise from WFP’s global footprint, capability and reach into the most remote and fragile corners of the world, there are promising, innovative trends that can be leveraged to boost impact. Further, the operating landscape – shaped by renewed commitment to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, United Nations reform, United Nations Security Council resolution 2417 and the Agenda for Humanity – positions WFP and its partners to turn the tide against hunger.
•The key drivers of hunger – conflict, the climate crisis and economic shocks – also present opportunities for renewed action and learning through programme activities that come together to achieve WFP’s strategic outcomes.
i) People are better able to meet their urgent food and nutrition needs: Saving lives in emergencies is WFP’s highest priority. WFP seeks to strengthen and improve its efficiency and effectiveness and systematically respond to emergencies at the right time, with the right skill sets and people and in the right manner. This includes strengthening early warning and anticipatory action and building a top-class, deployable workforce for emergencies. Working with partners, WFP also seeks to extend its reach and sustain access to affected populations and provide urgent food, cash and nutrition assistance, targeting those most vulnerable with speed, at scale and with the quality of support needed. Where possible, WFP will assume a more enabling role, strengthening national and local emergency response capabilities.
ii) People have better nutrition, health and education outcomes: Alongside meeting need, WFP will leverage its versatility and work with partners to reduce need, including by scaling up efforts to prevent and address malnutrition in all its forms and bolstering national safety nets and social assistance programmes. WFP’s drive to ensure that all hungry children benefit from a nutritious meal at school serves as a flagship effort with the potential to support local agriculture and markets, while simultaneously improving health, nutrition and education outcomes.
iii) People have improved and sustainable livelihoods: WFP will change lives while saving lives through risk-informed and integrated programmes that help build more resilient households and communities across rural and urban contexts. By layering community and household asset creation, smallholder agriculture market support activities, climate risk management interventions and climate change adaptation programming, WFP and its partners will support food-insecure populations in their efforts to adapt and improve their lives and livelihoods, build self-reliance and better withstand and more quickly recover from recurring shocks.
Iv) National programmes and systems are strengthened: Saving lives and changing lives is as much about how WFP works as what WFP does. Wherever possible, WFP will work through and in a manner that strengthens national systems, namely, emergency preparedness and response, food and social protection systems. For a long-term impact, WFP will increase its engagement as a broker of South–South and triangular cooperation through the WFP centres of excellence, regional bureaux and headquarters.
v) Humanitarian and development actors are more efficient and effective: WFP provides valuable services for partners in the areas of transport and logistics, procurement, cash-based transfers, administration, infrastructure, digital solutions and data analytics. These will be further enhanced and made available, on-demand, to augment national capacity and support governments and the humanitarian and development community. WFP also leads the logistics cluster and the emergency telecommunications cluster, and with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations co-leads the food security cluster, providing coordination and “last resort” capability for the global humanitarian system.
Q2. How has your organization supported Member States to accelerate their recovery from COVID-19 and the full implementation of the 2030 Agenda? How has your organization cooperated with other UN system organizations in these efforts to achieve coherence and synergies?
• The evaluation of WFP’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic noted that WFP revised 66 of its Country Strategic Plans to respond to the new conditions imposed by the pandemic by including emergency outcomes and revising targeting, modalities and budgets. Indeed, to address the increased hunger and malnutrition of people affected by COVID-19, but also conflict, climate change, and the global rise in the cost of living, WFP scaled up its response. In 2021, over 91 million beneficiaries were reached with unconditional resources transfers, an increase of 10 percent compared with 2020, reflecting WFP’s response to rising needs linked namely to COVID-19, as well as other factors (conflict, climate change and food and fuel cost increases). Social protection and resilience building programmes and livelihoods activities were also scaled up where appropriate, with WFP reaching over 128 million beneficiaries with targeted food assistance in 2021. Through advocacy, partnerships, fundraising and United Nations coordination, WFP contributed to system-wide initiatives and global policy dialogues on climate change, sustainable food systems, the COVID-19 response and increased coordination with international non-governmental organizations, the other Rome-based agencies and other United Nations entities. Strong progress was made in fostering global technical partnerships with, and mobilizing funding from, the private sector.
• WFP is committed to the operationalization of the recent WFP social protection strategy, which includes increased investment in WFP's global, regional and country-level capacity to deliver social protection expertise in support of countries' recovery from COVID-19 and the strengthening of national systems. An implementation plan is being finalized, with specific timebound activities covering workforce development; partnerships and funding; knowledge and learning management; cross-functional support and coherence; and monitoring and reporting.
Please highlight up to three high-impact initiatives, especially those that address interlinkages among the SDGs and involves interagency collaboration. Concrete initiatives might be selected to be spotlighted during relevant intergovernmental meetings.
| Initiative | UN FLEET |
| Partners | WFP, UNHCR |
| Relevant SDGs | SDG17 |
| Member States benefiting from the initiative | All |
| Description | WFP and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees have set up an independent service – UN FLEET - to help their partner UN organizations lease the vehicles they need for operations all around the world. The ongoing implementation of the UN Reform programme, and specifically the focus on cost efficiencies, is pushing all UN Agencies and Programmes to pursue more cost-efficient support services. By reducing the duplication of functions and administrative and transactional costs through the consolidation of fleet services, UN FLEET is a tangible UN Reform initiative providing support across the United Nations system towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. |
| Website | https://www.wfp.org/news/wfp-and-unhcr-launch-vehicle-leasing-service-u… |
Q3. Has your organization published or is it planning to publish any analytical work or guidance note or toolkits to guide and support recovery efforts from COVID-19 while advancing full implementation of SDGs at national, regional and global levels? Please select up to three high-impact resources to highlight, especially those that address interlinkages among the SDGs. Selected resources will be highlighted to inform relevant intergovernmental meetings.
| Resource | The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World |
| Publishing entity/entities | FAO, IFAD, WFP, UNICEF, WHO |
| Relevant SDGs | SDG2 |
| Target audience | The report targets a wide audience, including policy-makers, international organizations, academic institutions and the general public. |
| Description | The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World is an annual flagship report jointly prepared by FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO to inform on progress towards ending hunger, achieving food security and improving nutrition and to provide in depth analysis on key challenges for achieving this goal in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. |
| Website | https://www.wfp.org/publications/state-food-security-and-nutrition-worl… |
| Language | English |
Q4. How has your organization engaged with stakeholder groups to support SDG implementation and COVID-19 recovery at national, regional and global levels? Please provide main highlights, including any lessons learned. For example, what has worked particularly well as a model for effective stakeholder engagement?
• The critical role of the United Nations development system reform in supporting countries as they regain momentum on achieving the 2030 Agenda goals was highlighted in 2021. WFP implemented the reform actions established in 2018 by General Assembly resolution 72/297, and mainstreamed central elements of the quadrennial comprehensive policy review (QCPR) resolution adopted in December 2020 into the new WFP strategic plan for 2022–2025 and the related CRF. The reform initiatives enabled United Nations entities to support sustainable, inclusive and resilient recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic at the country level, with a particular focus on protecting development gains, analysing lessons learned from response plans and enhancing preparedness for shocks.
• In 2021, WFP enhanced its work on adaptive social protection as an important tool for reducing poverty (SDG 1) by responding to certain shocks and promoting education (SDG 4). WFP also supported the achievement of SDG 3 on improving health through its implementation of a broad package of health and nutrition services and its provision of operational support to the COVID-19 health response. Gender equality (SDG 5) was promoted when combined with measures to keep girls in school, discourage early marriage and support women’s empowerment. WFP’s smallholders, livelihoods, food systems and climate risk interventions contributed to the achievement of the 2030 Agenda goals related to environment and ecology (SDGs 13, 14 and 15) and peace and inclusion (SDG 16).
• Throughout 2021, the continued effects of the pandemic required a sustained and coherent contribution to the system-wide response. WFP maintained its collaboration with the World Health Organization and other health partners – such as Gavi and the global fund for COVID-19 response and recovery – including on linking food and nutrition programmes with health systems. WFP participated in the Secretary-General’s advisory committee on the COVID-19 response and recovery multi-partner trust fund throughout the year.
• Since the onset of the COVID-19 emergency, WFP has been increasingly recognized as a key provider of real-time information on food security at the global level. As of 31 December 2021, 36 countries were implementing WFP’s real-time food security monitoring tools, which collect data on corporate food security indicators, gender, nutrition and other cross-cutting issues using continuous remote surveys, with results visualized daily in WFP’s HungerMap LIVE.
• Together with other United Nations agencies, WFP supported 23 countries in finalizing their operational road maps for implementation of the Global Action Plan on Child Wasting adopted in March 2020. The road maps identify priority actions to be taken in the areas of health, food, social protection and water and sanitation systems to combat the increased risks of child wasting posed by COVID-19. In 2021, nearly 6 million children under 5 years of age were reached with wasting prevention and treatment services in six countries in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa through the renewed UNICEF-WFP partnership on ending child wasting. The partnership aims to improve the efficiency and coverage of joint interventions to address the high rates of child moderate acute malnutrition in those countries. In collaboration with the governments of nine countries, WFP completed Fill the Nutrient Gap analyses in 2021 aimed at identifying cost-effective interventions for improving nutrition in national food, health, social protection and education systems. WFP used the results of the analyses to design CBT and social and behaviour change activities for vulnerable adolescent girls and to advocate with donors and governments on increasing beneficiaries’ access to nutritious foods. Nearly 1.1 million people in nine countries were covered by forecast-based mechanisms that facilitate anticipatory action against climate shocks. In 2021, these mechanisms were triggered in five countries, where – to mitigate the combined effects of climate disaster and COVID-19 – about 146,000 people received more than USD 4.4 million in CBTs from WFP in anticipation of climate-related shocks. In these five countries WFP implemented integrated climate risk management activities, including forecast-based financing and climate insurance, to address the multiple dimensions of risk effectively and efficiently. Climate risk financing instruments can protect all vulnerable individuals, households and communities in a given geographic region from a wide range of climate-related risks and reduce expenditures on humanitarian responses to repeated climate shocks. More than 5.2 million beneficiaries in 16 countries received tailored seasonal weather forecasts and climate information services through face-to-face and other communication channels, or services that improve their capacities to plan, invest in and adapt to the impacts of climate change. In 2021, more than 1.7 million people in 14 countries were provided with access to sustainable energy services for food consumption, production and communications. People received clean and efficient household cooking appliances, access to energy products and services for agricultural production, and solar power systems and appliances.
If your organization has established multi-stakeholder partnership(s) in this regard, please describe them (name, partners involved, relevant SDGs, Member States benefiting from the partnership) and provide links to relevant websites for more information.
| Partnership | School Meals Coalition |
| Partners | - |
| Relevant SDGs | SDG2, SDG3, SDG 4, SDG 17 |
| Member States benefiting from the initiative | The Coalition will support governments and their partners to improve the quality of school meals and strengthen school meal systems globally, in a manner which is tailored to local contexts and which promotes the sharing of international best practices. |
| Description | In early 2020, school feeding programmes delivered more meals than ever before, to 388 million children, or one out of every two primary school children worldwide. This historic progress was the culmination of a decade of action by governments and their partners. However, there was still work to be done with 73 million of the most vulnerable girls and boys without access to school meals. The COVID-19 pandemic brought this progress to a sudden halt. In April 2020, during the height of the pandemic, almost all countries closed their schools, leaving 370 million school children without access to the one meal a day they could rely on. To ensure that every child has the opportunity to grow, learn and thrive, a group of member states and partners are forming an international School Meals Coalition. |
| Website | https://schoolmealscoalition.org/ |
| Partnership | INITIATE2 |
| Partners | WFP, WHO |
| Relevant SDGs | SDG2, SDG3 |
| Member States benefiting from the initiative | - |
| Description | WFP and the World Health Organization (WHO) launched INITIATE2, a joint project to bring together emergency actors, research and academic institutions, and international and national partners to promote knowledge sharing and skills transfer for improved emergency response to health crises. INITIATE2 will develop standardized, innovative solutions such as disease-specific field facilities and kits and test these solutions in real-life scenarios. The agencies will also train logistics and health responders on their installation and use, contributing to their capacity to respond in health crises. The project will be developed and replicated in countries for relevant personnel, building on past experiences in emergency response. |
| Website | https://www.who.int/news/item/19-07-2021-wfp-and-who-launch-innovative-… |
Q5. In the 2019 SDG Summit declaration (GA Resolution 74/4), Member States outlined ten priority areas for accelerated action in SDG implementation. Please highlight any major integrated and innovative policies or initiatives that your organization may have adopted in these ten priority areas:
5.1 leaving no one behind
For these areas listed in this question, WFP’s Strategic Plan outlines actions planned to address these topics, for example the cross-cutting areas of social protection and school meals.
Q6. Following the adoption of the 2022 Ministerial Declaration, please highlight any major integrated and innovative policies or initiatives that your organization may have adopted related to the below, if applicable:
6.1 Member States encouraged "the United Nations system and all relevant actors to take advantage of emerging technologies and their applications, as appropriate, in order to maximize impact and effectiveness in data analysis and collection and stress the need to bridge the digital gap among and within countries" (Paragraph 86)
N/A
6.2 Member States specifically called upon the UN system "to work with the newly established United Nations Food Systems Coordination Hub, hosted by FAO, to support Governments to develop and strengthen SDG-based national pathways for sustainable food systems transformation" (Paragraph 128)
While WFP has not yet launched major policies or initiatives since the adoption of the Ministerial Declaration, the organization’s Strategic Plan (2022-2025) aims to achieve these goals and present a pathway towards their attainment.
Q7. The 2023 SDG Summit is expected to provide political leadership, guidance and recommendations for sustainable development and follow-up and review progress in the implementation of sustainable development commitments and the achievement of the 2030 Agenda, including through national and regional consultations, which will mark the beginning of a new phase of accelerated progress towards the SDGs. In the lead up to the 2023 SDG Summit, please provide your organization’s recommendations on how to overcome challenges to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the achievement of the SDGs, taking into account the thematic reviews and voluntary national reviews conducted to date.
WFP’s Strategic Plan (2022-2025) considers the challenges ahead for food security and the wider implications and aims to accelerate progress on the Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030 and outlines the organization’s pathway to ending world hunger.