Child hunger · Practice

Keep it going.

Giving once is easy. The problem outlasts your attention, so the practice is a rhythm: a few minutes a month, one call a year, and knowing what to say when someone at the table repeats the old numbers. Tick things here; the ticks stay on your device.

What’s true Do the thing

The rhythm

Today

Set up the monthly gift, any amount, and write down why you chose that charity. You’ll want the reason in a year.
Put a reminder on 10 December: “call senators, nutrition”. The script takes five minutes.

Every month

When the charge appears, take ten seconds to remember what it’s for. Don’t raise it on a bad news day; raise it when you get a raise.

Every quarter

Read one update from the charity you chose. Fifteen minutes. If they report only activity (meals, cartons) and never outcomes (children recovered, relapse), note it.

Every year

Once a year: GiveWell re-reviews its top charities; its page was last updated October 2026. Re-read the top charities page and decide, once, whether to move your gift.¹
September to December: Congress sets next year’s spending. One call, with the current numbers. The Do page carries this year’s; next year’s will be different.
When famine is in the news: relief follows the photographs and collapses when they stop, by one well-known study.² Keep your money where the evidence is. Add to it if you want; don’t move it on a picture.

One reminder on the first of each month that opens this page. It holds no dates or figures, so it never goes out of date.

The drill

Six things people say. Decide your answer, then open it.

“A child dies of hunger every ten seconds.”

Out of date

That’s 2011 data. Child deaths have fallen since; the same share of today’s total is about one every 14 seconds, about 2.2 million a year. Still a modelled estimate.³

“$47 saves a child’s life.”

Half right

$47 buys one child’s course of therapeutic food. The whole treatment, with the nurse and clinic, is $100 to $200. Most treated children would have survived anyway, so one death prevented costs about $1,500 to $5,500. All three numbers are true; say which one you mean.¹

“Aid just gets stolen.”

Some does; not this

Bulk food in war zones is diverted. Clinic treatment is hard to steal: a worker measures a specific child’s arm and hands the sachets to that family. The honest weak point is relapse: about a quarter of recovered children in one study fell back within six months.⁴

“There isn’t enough food for everyone.”

False

Supply passed 3,000 calories a person a day in 2023. Hunger is about access and conflict, not quantity. The World Food Programme calls conflict the primary cause.⁵

“It’s getting better on its own.”

It was

Child deaths fell 63% from 1990 to 2023. Then donors cut aid in 2025, and the Gates Foundation’s model projects that year as the first rise this century. The trend was real. It wasn’t automatic.⁶

“Women grow most of the world’s food.”

Unsupported

A widely repeated line with no data behind it; the UN food agency’s own research found no basis. Women are about half the farm and food workforce in sub-Saharan Africa, which is the fact to use instead.⁷

With others

Say what you give, and why. moderate In experiments, hearing what others gave raised gifts by up to 12%, and offering a split between a favourite cause and an effective one raised donations to the effective one by 76%.⁸
Use a match if your workplace offers one. moderate A one-to-one match raised giving in a field experiment; bigger ratios added nothing.⁸
Instead of a canned-food drive, run a SNAP sign-up day with your food bank’s outreach team. moderate Help with the application raised SNAP enrolment in a randomised trial with older adults.⁹
Don’t organise a trip to an orphanage. moderate: evidence of harm Volunteering and donations keep children in institutions when many have a living parent.¹⁰

Say it in thirty seconds

Practice this until it’s yours:

About two million young children a year die with malnutrition as part of the cause, mostly from infections a fed child would survive. The treatment is a carton of peanut paste and a weekly arm measurement; it costs a couple of hundred dollars a child and it works. The money for it got cut in 2025. I give monthly, and once a year I call my senators about it. Want the link?

Your checklist

Gift set up: GiveWell monthly, ALIMA or the IRC monthly, or Taimaka once.
Called both senators before 11 December 2026.
Called my House member.
Read what’s true.
Found my local food bank and gave or volunteered once. Feeding America by ZIP.
Sent this page to one person.

Sources

GiveWell, Top charities, updated October 2026, and grant reviews for Taimaka and IRC. evaluator
Eisensee and Strömberg, News droughts, news floods and US disaster relief, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2007. Metadata confirmed; the paper itself wasn’t read for this page. research, unread
UN IGME, 4.9 million child deaths in 2024, March 2026 primary; Black et al., Maternal and child undernutrition and overweight in low-income and middle-income countries, The Lancet, 2013 research.
IRC, simplified protocol research summary, July 2023 (26% relapse at six months in Mali). charity’s own figures
FAO, Food balance sheets 2010–2023, October 2025; WFP, Ending hunger. primary
UN IGME 2024 report; Gates Foundation, Goalkeepers 2025 report (4.6 million child deaths in 2024, projected about 4.8 million in 2025). primary
Doss, FAO ESA working paper 11-04, March 2011 (“no support for the 60–80% figure at a global scale”); FAO, The status of women in agrifood systems, 2023 (women are 50% of agrifood-system workers in sub-Saharan Africa). primary
Shang and Croson, A field experiment in charitable contribution: the impact of social information on the voluntary provision of public goods, Economic Journal, 2009 research; Caviola and Greene, Boosting the impact of charitable giving with donation bundling and micromatching, Science Advances, 2023 research; Karlan and List, Does price matter in charitable giving? Evidence from a large-scale natural field experiment, American Economic Review, 2007 research.
Finkelstein and Notowidigdo, Take-up and targeting: experimental evidence from SNAP, NBER working paper, 2018; published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2019. research
Goldman et al., Institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation of children 2: policy and practice recommendations for global, national, and local actors, The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, 2020, part of a Lancet Group Commission. research

The 11 December date and the dollar figures in the call script expire with this year’s spending bills.

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