Freedom From Hunger Technical

Many people who know Freedom from Hunger’s current work ask about the origins of our program strategy.  For a quarter century, Freedom from Hunger has focused on providing support to women who come together in groups in very poor communities, to receive microfinance services in combination with education and health services and products that can be delivered along with microfinance.   Here we provide selected documents that reflect the early thinking behind this value-added microfinance strategy.  While we thought through our strategy quite carefully from the start, we have had to adjust as we learned a great deal about how it works and doesn’t work in a variety of countries with our many partner organizations.  These documents help to show the evolution of our program strategy.
 
Freedom from Hunger was founded in 1946 as Meals for Millions.  Our organization has passed through some major different strategic phases before it got to what we focus on now.  However, throughout the history there have been two threads of strategic consistency.  The first thread is science-based innovation to develop a new way to help the hungry poor.  The second thread is distribution of innovation, not by providing the new service directly to the poor, but by teaching and supporting other organizations on the front lines of service delivery to offer the innovations we developed.  We are, in effect, innovators and wholesalers of innovation to the retailers of services to the poor.  Credit with Education and its variations are the latest innovations that we’ve developed and shown others how to offer to the hungry poor.