Global Hunger Index

Project Description

Every year, hundreds of millions of people worldwide suffer from hunger and undernutrition. Current research has made clear that hunger is only to a small extent a problem of global food availability. Hunger is multidimensional – it comprises not only insufficient caloric intake but also deficiencies in the quality of diets and their consequences, particularly for children – and it is driven by violent conflict, climate change, economic crises, poverty and inequality, as well as their interplay. Hunger is thus, above all, the result of political decisions. The human right to adequate food is enshrined in international law, and with the 2030 Agenda the international community has committed itself to ending hunger by 2030 (SDG 2). Zero Hunger by 2030 remains achievable – yet progress has stalled, largely due to a lack of political will and priority. This lack of political will concerns not only individual countries and their respective hunger situations, but equally the global community, which is increasingly retreating from its shared responsibility in the fight against hunger worldwide. At the same time, attention and funding are often mobilised only once acute food crises have already occurred, while long-term investments in food and nutrition security lag behind. In this regard, it is important to create reliable evidence and to strengthen awareness and accountability in the fight against hunger, before crises escalate and cause major harm and losses.

The Global Hunger Index has been taking on this task since 2006. Jointly published by Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide, the annual, peer-reviewed editions focus on a main topic and include the GHI, which was originally developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). In 2024, the report was published for the first time in cooperation with the Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict (IFHV) of the Ruhr-University Bochum, which as academic partner took over the calculation and further development of the index and scientific communication as well as the report's trend analyses and methodological documentation.

Aims and Objectives

In order to guarantee the quality of the GHI, it is necessary to continuously monitor and improve the concept and indicators and keep them up to date. From an academic perspective, the key goal of this project is thus to build upon the concept of the GHI as it was developed by IFPRI, refine it and adapt it to current needs as well as the development and availability of data. In more detail this includes:

Translation of hunger as an abstract and multidimensional concept into measurable indicators and criteria that allow the visualisation of selected characteristics and features of this complex phenomenon;
Continuous review and updating of the four component indicators of the index – undernourishment, child stunting, child wasting and child mortality – as well as the exploration of potential new indicators, data sources and statistical methodologies for combining the different dimensions of hunger and undernutrition;
Development of approaches to address data gaps and to assess the hunger situation where data availability and quality are limited;
Extension of the analyses across spatial and temporal scales;
Maintenance of an indicator and index system that is mainly based on official and publicly available data that is updated regularly – a central precondition for the transparency and broad acceptance of the index;
Furthermore, the indicator system and index should enable practitioners, experts and policymakers to communicate the necessity of political action towards ending hunger.

The GHI is not intended to capture the whole complexity of hunger, its causes or the various context-specific features of food and nutrition insecurity. General data limitations exist, particularly in conflict-affected and crisis countries, where hunger is often most severe; acute food crises, in turn, lie beyond the scope of the index and are addressed in the report through complementary analyses such as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). Rather, by measuring hunger at the national level on the basis of comparable data, the index provides a global and comparable picture of the hunger situation, while the ranking of countries calls attention to where needs are greatest and holds policymakers accountable. In this context, the GHI should give a first overview and stimulate further discussions on how to accelerate progress towards Zero Hunger by 2030 – with a special emphasis on hunger as a multidimensional and, above all, political problem."