Hope In The Face Of A Humanitarian Crisis

Once again the World Food Programme Innovation Accelerator in Munich last night delivered very mixed emotions for me. The scale of the challenge facing humanitarian organisations is huge - but there are some amazing people working on solutions.

My full report on the eight wonderful innovations from the pitch night is below.

I’ll start though with a few calls to action for my network:

• Please follow Bernhard Kowatsch and the WFP Innovation Accelerator team as things will move fast in next few months - the impending de-funding of humanitarian efforts by certain actors will create a funding gap that will need to be filled
• Share this article to your networks - I'll share on X too (@steveemecz)
• Download the ShareTheMeal app – even if you don’t have the means to donate now, keep it for when you can buy someone a meal for 75 cents - I'm practising this myself with a meal bought for every book bought on the MX Publishing website - we've managed through this simple mechanism to buy over 1,000 meals so far

There are some more specific asks in the article depending on who you are and who you work for. One of the impressive aspects of these innovation nights with the WFP is heavyweight participation from regional (Bavaria) and national (German) government ministers.

One of the German ministers who spoke with passion last night referred to the situation as ‘scary’. That’s a seasoned 40+ years politician admitting to being scared – we all need to pay attention.

In the afternoon I participated in the WFP Innovation Accelerator Advisory Council meeting and saw this slide, which was repeated in the public session. Prior to 2019 the world had made some good progress towards the concept of #zerohunger by 2030 – but, as one of the speakers referred to, the three ‘Cs’ – conflict, costs, and climate – have reversed the trend in a horrible way. The number of people facing acute food insecurity has more than doubled from 135m to 343m in just five years. So rather than progress, we’re sliding backwards at an alarming rate.

But as Cindy McCain the Executive Director of the WFP said in her closing speech, there is hope - and a key source of that hope is the innovation that the room full of entrepreneurs, government officials and investors are delivering with the common goal of disrupting hunger.

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The WFP Innovation Accelerator 2025 Pitch Night

It’s my eighth year working with the WFP and every time I come to Munich I see that the bar has been raised again. A big thanks to the whole WFP team for all the work that goes into these events that bring investors together with projects. Here’s a quick summary of the eight programs (all successful and looking to scale) that were pitching for funding last night. Some high tech, some low tech and lots of AI. Please don't hesitate to reach out to them if you can provide resources (funds, skills, introductions etc).

Pitch 1 – RDI Irrigation

Janice G. Buesing

Janice took us through an great low-tech irrigation system that uses gravity, with no electricity and can be deployed in remote regions. It uses 50% less fertiliser, increases yields by 50% and uses 40% less water than standard irrigation. The successful pilot in Abu Dhabi has opened the way to support 1m+ refugees through an investment of $2m.

Pitch 2 – Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies

adsymtech.com

Rusty Rodriguez

Rusty took us through the patented biotech microbes solution that transforms crops to become more resistant. It essentials uses the natural tech found in plants that survive in extreme heat to modify the makeup of crops so that they can withstand great heat. They’ve reached 30,000 farmers in 8 countries and increased yields by 300% with 2m+ acres treated. The ROI is 200%.

Pitch 3 – P-Vita

https://p-vita.b12sites.com

Naglaa Mohammad

In a very upbeat pitch Naglaa explained how P-Vita repurposes costly palm tree waste into fertiliser. They use a patented co-culture to convert the waste and the program is recycling 20,000kg of waste annually so far, with a 40% increase in yield and 8% increase in income for the smallholder farmers. They are looking for $500k to increase to 0.5 tonnes of waste in Egypt and expand across into Saudi Arabia and UAE.

Pitch 4 – Partners With Sun

partnerswithsun.com

Hitaf Ghazal

Bread is the key staple keeping millions of people alive and production is a challenge. To feed 15,000 people for example takes 300 litres of diesel, costing about $300USD and creates about a tonne of CO2 a day. Hitaf’s team have created a ‘Solar Convection Oven’ that feeds the same number of people with no fuel cost and no CO2 emmissions. As it is solar it can be deployed pretty much anywhere – even in disaster or conflict areas. They received a global patent in 2024 and deployed 2 ovens that are feeding 30,000 people daily. They are looking for $600k investment to scale up to feed 100,000 a day.

Pitch 5 – SKAI

https://innovation.wfp.org/project/SKAI

Amine BAHA

I hope to do a video interview with Amine that I can share with all of you as this one really needs the visuals to tell the story. Essentially SKA uses artificial intelligence to process satellite imagery from disaster zones to enable humanitarian agencies to prioritise support within hours. Traditionally it would take up to three weeks to remap a region and work out what buildings/roads/bridges have been damaged. SKAI does it in about 24 hours. So far across a bunch of disasters Amine’s team have assessed 3.8m buildings and identified 430,000 that have been heavily damaged / destroyed. In the monsoon in Pakistan, they analysed 850,000 households covering 2.5m people. In Hurricane Milton, 860,000 households across Florida enabling rapid cash assistance to be delivered to 1,000 households. It’s 6x to 13x faster than traditional methods and critically up to 77% cheaper to deploy.

?Pitch 6 – Food Security Cat Bond

World Bank & WFP

When a disaster hits, like drought, fundraising is too slow to react and leads to inefficiency in funds deployment. We need innovate funding mechanisms and this is where a collaboration between the World Bank and WFP comes in. This new bond aiming to launch in 2025 would build a $100m USD catastrophe (cat) bond for catastrophic drought. This would protect 2.5m people in Sub-Saharan Africa against this type of crisis.

Pitch 7 – Building Blocks

wfp.org/building-blocks

Monika Bernard

I loved this concept – so simple but so needed. Monika explained that when disaster strikes there is usually a huge amount of support, but as its largely unco-ordinated, there is a tonne of duplication of effort and wasted money and resources. For example, there are over 600 agencies live in Ukraine at the moment. Building blocks is a co-ordination platform that enables these agencies to work together. So far 65 organisations in Ukraine have joined and are using the platform and in 2024 alone has had an impact of over $60m.

Pitch 8 – SCOUT

https://innovation.wfp.org/project/scout

Daniel Mactaggart

Dan is a decision scientist and I’m hoping to work with him and the team as a personal mentor on SCOUT which is incredible. As Dan explains, the WFP’s logistical supply chain is the most complex in the world with more ships, aircraft, goods, projects and people than any other. Or in other words, there are more potential variables in the system than stars in the solar system. 130 countries, 3000 transit points and more than 30,000 connections. I don’t have a page wide enough to share how many zeros are involved. The current SCOUT AI driven system is delivering $2m a year cost savings into the WFP supply chain over a limited number of commodities and regions (about a 171,000 person impact). The scaled up version aims to reach $50m in savings and several million people impacted.

Once again the WFP Innovation Accelerator has shown world class filtering of hundreds of potential innovations down to a shortlist of those with big impacts. Fantastic mentoring from the Google team, strategy support from BCG and host of partners in the ecosystem and public and private sector mentors. The team now has 18 programs running delivering hundreds of projects.

One thing that has struck me over the last eight years being involved in the program is that the big governmental actors supporting the accelerator are the same each year – Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Switzerland and Luxembourg as the main ones. As the accelerator is based in Munich (though projects are in hundreds of countries) maybe that’s has an effect but I would urge anyone in my network that has connections to governmental departments responsible for tackling conflict, climate, cost of living and want a high return for their humanitarian investment to please reach out. The WFP is very likely saving lives in your region or even country every day and we’d love to have you engage with us.

As the team said last night, we may be facing the greatest humanitarian crisis of our lifetimes - but there is hope through innovation and we can all do our part. From buying a meal to donating data scientist's time to making private sector connections everyone in my network can make a difference.?

By day Steve works in digital transformation and by night runs MX Publishing a social enterprise publisher of Sherlock Holmes books.