Name: Global hunger is rising: Here’s how A.I. can help
Uploaded: 2022-09-06
Duration: 6 min 23 s
Description: According to the UN's World Food Programme, nearly 600 million people face food insecurity around the world – and that number has been rising. But new developments in artificial intelligence are allowing groups from the UN to smaller startups to target who needs help and devise efficient ways to deliver assistance.

According to the UN's World Food Programme, nearly 600 million people face food insecurity around the world – and that number has been rising. But new developments in artificial intelligence are allowing groups from the UN to smaller startups to target who needs help and devise efficient ways to deliver assistance.

Global hunger is rising: Here’s how A.I. can help

Tech

New developments in artificial intelligence are allowing groups from the UN to smaller startups to target who needs help.

Russia's war in Ukraine has amplified the global food crisis. Global food costs climb even further on climate change, covid 19 and inequality it threatens to keep tens of millions of people over the edge into food security. We are in unprecedented times. In 2019 we had about 100 and 30 million people who were in hunger crisis or worse situation today. That number is 345 Million people off wage. About 50 million people in 45 countries are in what we call hunger emergencies, meaning one step away from famine, putting feet on the ground to do these assessments, especially in conflict into these affected areas. It's very, very difficult and extremely expensive. So we need to know what is happening in countries. We need to know what is happening on the ground. That is the predictive power of Ai in the World Food Program. We have something which we call hunger map life. This is based on a i artificial intelligence, it has two components, one is actual measurement, meaning that works on daily surveys and about three dozen plus countries. And then the second part, which is another 50 to 60 countries which is purely a I driven we combine these two segments with high frequency data from climate meaning rainfall, vegetation to things like conflict to things like disasters to things like high frequency economic data to come up with the real time story of the situation in different countries. The predictive AI data which has taken all the assessment work which was done in the past and using deep learning and made sense and came up with an hour casting estimate of that particular place. It is predictive. So it is an alarm for us to see oh there's something may be going wrong in this particular place. Let's go verify. And I think that is the most critical part of this whole equation Hunger Map live which is real time and across time is a complement to on the ground assessments because you cannot do on the ground assessments every day even if you could go there. But you can do annual assessment of a particular place or one big survey every three years and then use these systems to see how things are changing. We have no longer areas which are no good if we cannot put feet on the ground in those places. We have technologies in 2021 using Hunger Map, lives saved w. FP with World Food Program, $18 million on assessments. So if you can find out immediately that something is not working, you can fix it right away without wasting millions of dollars and that is a huge huge value. We have enough food to feed maybe nine million people right now. The problem is how their food is value. Whether we're looking at it from an environmental point of view or we are looking at just from economic point of view or food security point of view, we need to put a handle on the food waste side. Sometimes you need to think bigger than what we currently do in order to fix that problem. So I replaced, we rethink food waste and food insecurity and essentially we are a B two B platform that connects businesses that have surplus food to the communities in need instantly. And the way it works is these businesses request in a very similar fashion they can request pick up on demand or scheduled recurrent weekly pickup. Were heavily driven team in the end of driven team, we care a lot about the accuracy of our impact metrics and delivering the impasse metrics back to the stakeholders, meaning that if a business is working with us, they know exactly how many pounds they donated, How many meals, where did it go? The top nonprofits are on the dash, but they know where the food was, right. They learn about these nonprofits, they can also know about the environmental impact and social impact and they can comply with sp 13 83 and comply with E S G S G sustainability goals. So this transparency into the food system and the ability to see your accurate impact data is very crucial. That's that's one thing, the other thing is more philosophic in terms of, look, we're not going to just move any food, We know our end users need nutritious food. So we're going to be very careful in terms of we bring as a donor third element, which is what we're very proud of is the idea of using ai in prediction. So now we have the ability to predict at each location, how much food is going to be. We also know the items of food that is mostly donated. When we have that forecasting, we can first recover more because we know how much in there, we know which food rescue will be the most optimal for that pickup and then we know that nonprofits can take all of it rather than wasting it. The more technical you become in terms of like using technology or even looking at data, the smarter you become and you don't need necessarily as many people to be on site to do certain jobs. If you can deliver, let's say 1000 meals with one person. If you can get to a point where you can deliver 2000 meals with the same person, then you've done incredible because now you're a dollar per me is delivered becomes less right and you can deliver more food with less. So technology allows us to do that. And then the more important one, which is again, the idea of giving people what they want. So if a nonprofit needs food of this amount of 50 meals between 2 to 3 p.m. On Wednesday and it's only halal or only kosher or it's a specific nutritional needs, then that's what you need to, you're not doing favor, if you're just channeling food from a certain supermarket that is not needed to a nonprofit that do not, the more data and the more prediction and the more understanding of what's really happening from the reflection on that data, they're more likely to be able to serve the community. Technologies are allowing us to see more around the world in terms of how hunger may be rising, but also how what we do or our partners do how that is making a dent in food and security around the world.