About ActSmall · Food
A public-good food-insecurity portal: live country-level hunger from WFP plus IPC 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 Sahel countries: the standard inter-agency framework for declaring Crisis (Phase 3), Emergency (Phase 4), and Famine (Phase 5) conditions.
- Disaster cross-link — IFRC GO active emergency appeals, used to surface the operator running an active response 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: WFP donor pages, GiveDirectly, World Central Kitchen, ReFED, the FAO 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 FEWS NET and IPC technical reports are linked.
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If you find an error, an out-of-date source, a broken link, or a claim that overstates the underlying evidence: please email submissions@actsmall.org with the page URL and what looks wrong.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