About ActSmall · Food
A public-good food-insecurity portal: live country-level hunger from plus acute-crisis phases, paired with one concrete weekend-doable citizen action per place. The shared policies (privacy, license, terms, contribute) live on actsmall.org — this page covers only what is specific to food.
Mission
ActSmall · Food exists to make it easier for anyone — a high-school student doing a service project, a parent looking to set up a recurring gift, a community group running a food drive, a retiree with a Saturday free — to see where the hunger gap is, and to find a low-cost, citizen-scale thing to do about it.
Data sources for food
The country map joins these open-data feeds, pulled once a day at ~20:31 UTC (with up to a 60-minute jitter window) by a small AWS Lambda.
- Country hunger figures — the World Food Programme HungerMap LIVE: a daily mobile-survey + earth-observation pipeline that publishes the proportion of each country’s population in insufficient food consumption. Updated daily; CC BY 4.0.
- Acute food-crisis classifications — the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification and Cadre Harmonisé reports for West and Central Africa: the standard inter-agency framework for declaring Crisis (Phase 3), Emergency (Phase 4), and (Phase 5) conditions.
- Disaster cross-link — GO active emergency appeals, included among the acute-crisis actions when a food crisis overlaps with a live disaster operation.
- National food-bank gateways — published locator pages from Feeding America, Trussell Trust (UK), Food Banks Canada, Foodbank Australia, and the European Food Banks Federation.
- Country borders — Natural Earth (public domain).
- Basemap — OpenFreeMap & OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).
- Action catalog — assembled by hand from open-access materials: donor pages, GiveDirectly, World Central Kitchen, ReFED, the Food Loss and Waste platform. Each entry links to its primary reference.
How the daily refresh and curator work in general: actsmall.org/methodology/.
Vetted operators only
Our preference is for vetted aid agencies with audited accounts and decades of operational experience. We will not link to single-issue crowdfunding campaigns whose finances cannot be inspected. Country averages also hide intra-country variation; for sub-national hunger, the and technical reports are available in the action catalogue and the Learn library.
If something is wrong
If you find an error, an out-of-date source, a broken link, or a claim that overstates the underlying evidence: please email submissions@actsmall.org with the page URL and what looks wrong. The maintainers will review.
Where to read more
- actsmall.org/about/ — mission, editorial posture, license
- actsmall.org/methodology/ — how the daily Lambda & link curator work, AI-tooling disclosure
- actsmall.org/privacy/ — privacy, beacon mechanics, log retention
- actsmall.org/terms/ — terms of use & disclaimers
- actsmall.org/contribute/ — how to help open the data, contribute observations, lobby
- Get qualified help — if something has gone wrong