The Global Performance Report 2019 outlines and reflects on Action Against Hunger’s global achievements and reach in 2019.
In 2019, Action Against Hunger continued to provide effective assistance to affected populations around the world. We operated in 46 countries, delivering assistance in the sectors of nutrition, health, WaSH (water, hygiene and sanitation), food security and livelihoods (FSL), disaster risk reduction (DRR), care practices and mental health.
In all our interventions, we endeavoured to respect our key principles: independence, neutrality, transparency, free and direct access to victims, non-discrimination, professionalism. In 2019, we increased the number of interventions by 38 per cent, delivering 654 projects against 473 in 2018. Overall, 40 per cent of projects implemented were multi-sectoral, having components in health and nutrition, WaSH, FSL, care practices, mental health, DRR, advocacy and food assistance.
Our main objective to address and alleviate hunger brought our actions to reach over 17 million people in 2019, with a slight decrease of 18 per cent compared to 2018. Overall, we reached 40 per cent of the beneficiaries (6,983,097 individuals) in our identified high burden countries while 60 per cent (10,453,254) in the rest of the countries where we intervene.
Since 2015, we have been monitoring the indicators of our International Strategic Plan 2016-2020 to reach our intended targets: to reduce mortality in children under 5 years old; reduce the prevalence of chronic and acute undernutrition; increase coverage of programs to treat severe acute undernutrition; to cover unmet needs within the scope of Action Against Hunger expertise during emergencies and improve program and strategies on undernutrition.
We contributed to reduce child mortality in ten selected high burden countries. In 2019, we provided support to reduce child mortality in Kita (Mali), in Guidimakha (Mauritania), Keita-bouza and Diffa (Niger) and in Borno and Yobe (Nigeria). Such improvements were possible because we increased the number of health and education sessions by 84 per cent, and we increased the number of care practices and nutrition/health projects, respectively by 10 and 24 per cent since last year. In 2019, 6 million people benefitted from our nutrition interventions and almost 3 million from our health support.