Food Assistance & Livelihoods in Emergencies
Hunger: Rewriting the childhood of millions
A growing hunger crisis is putting millions of children at risk. More than 295 million people across 50 countries and territories are now living with high acute food insecurity, a sixth straight annual rise and nearly three times the number in 2016. For children, this means empty classrooms, fragile health, and futures cut short. Famine-like conditions are already taking hold in the occupied Palestinian territory, and parts of Sudan, while South Sudan edges dangerously closer. For billions, a healthy diet is out of reach, turning food into a daily struggle rather than a basic right.
Across countries facing the most severe hunger risks, children are growing up on the frontlines of overlapping crises. Conflict, climate shocks, and economic pressures are converging, pushing families to the breaking point. When food systems collapse, children are always the first and hardest hit. Hunger erodes their health, disrupts their learning, and strips away protection, leaving damage that can last a lifetime. Women face heightened risks too, shaped by biological needs and deep‑rooted social and economic inequalities. Yet even in the most fragile contexts, families and communities continue to show resilience and determination in the face of relentless pressure.
Humanitarian Need
From emergency to resilience: Protecting children from hunger
When hunger intensifies, children are the first to suffer and the most vulnerable to protection. World Vision stands with children and families before crisis hits, through emergency response and into recovery and resilience, ensuring children’s survival and futures are not lost to hunger. With over 75 years of experience, we deliver life-saving food and cash assistance, along with livelihoods that protect dignity, stabilize families, and help communities recover.
Every child has the right to enough nutritious food to grow, learn and live safely. By meeting urgent food needs, World Vision reduces the daily burden on families and helps protect children’s health, education and futures so no child is left hungry in a world that has enough.
In 2025, our food assistance programme reached nearly 10 million people worldwide, with children accounting for 60% of those supported, helping families survive hunger and protecting the health and futures of the most vulnerable.
Our Impact
Our Approaches
Food Assistance
World Vision provides a range of interventions designed to ensure crisis‑affected or food‑insecure populations can access safe, nutritious, and sufficient food while protecting their dignity. It includes providing in‑kind food such as cereals, pulses, and fortified oil; cash transfers or vouchers that allow families to buy food directly from local markets; and specialised nutritious foods for children and pregnant or breastfeeding women to prevent or treat malnutrition.
Cash for food
Our Cash-for-food assistance programmes help households access food by giving them the purchasing power to buy what they need directly from local markets. With cash in hand, families can choose culturally preferred foods, such as rice, beans, vegetables, or fish, rather than receiving a fixed food ration.
Livelihoods in Emergencies
World Vision helps families, experiencing extreme vulnerabilities protect, recover, and rebuild their livelihoods in the face of conflict, climate shocks, displacement, and economic crises. Our approach focuses on strengthening productive and resilient livelihoods so households can meet their children’s food, nutrition, and income needs even during emergencies.
School Meals
In fragile contexts, World Vision implements School Meals programmes that act as a lifeline, ensuring children receive at least one reliable, nutritious meal each day while providing stability, safety, and support for learning during conflict or crisis. School meals function as part of a social protection system, maintain daily routines, and help families cope by reducing household food burdens.
Feature Stories
Access life‑saving nutrition and care provided to children and families displaced in Cambodia
As thousands of families remain displaced in Cambodia, Germany‑funded support delivered by World Vision is helping pregnant women, newborns, and young children access life‑saving nutrition and care when they need it most.
I Have Nothing Left”: How Cash Aid Is Keeping Afghan Families Alive
As drought and inflation strip everything away, cash assistance is helping Kemia, a grandmother raising orphaned grandchildren in rural Afghanistan, buy food, survive with dignity, and face a deepening crisis with hope.
From Garden to Plate: How Haitian Students Are Growing Hope
In crisis‑hit Haiti, students at Grand Pré National School are growing their own vegetables, turning a school garden supported by World Vision into nutritious meals, practical skills, and a powerful lesson in self‑sufficiency amid rising hunger.
Farming Their Way Out of Hunger: How Women in Sudan Are Reclaiming Food Security
