JEDDAH, 13 May 2007 — At different times throughout the Middle East today, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Libya, Jordan, Egypt, and Yemen will join the world in sending an urgent message: Child hunger has no place in the Middle East or the world and citizens can put an end to it.
The campaign has also been organized to coincide with the celebration in over 50 countries of Mother’s Day. This adds an extra emphasis to the fact that every five seconds, a mother loses her child to hunger.
For this year’s annual walk, the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) together with its global partners, TNT and Unilever, have teamed up with celebrities, dignitaries, employees, NGO partners, family, friends and people affected by hunger themselves to “Fight Hunger and Walk the World.”
The proceeds will go to WFP’s Global School Feeding Program with the initiative linking food to education by offering free meals to the world’s most vulnerable children.
“This is a partnership that was first introduced five years ago and we are involved because we believe we can make a difference in helping to end hunger,” said Bryan Moulds, a spokesman for TNT.
“The main thing we want to focus on is awareness followed by donations that can allow for professionals to be deployed. So far every year has proven to be a successful one and it is for this reason that TNT, in the last couple of years, has handed the project over to the United Nations to allow for expansion through its food program and eventually to rid the globe of hunger by 2015,” Moulds concluded.
The global campaign will begin in New Zealand at 10 in the morning, moving like clockwork through each of the planet’s time zones as well as the world’s capital cities and villages in Asia, Europe and Africa. It will end in the Americas.
“Walk the World brings together any and all who care about child hunger,” said WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran. “This unique event involves the very people who suffer from hunger themselves, children displaced by civil conflicts and children who receive daily meals at schools in developing countries.”
“If ignored, child hunger will remain a daily reality that ravages millions and goes unseen by most. Walk the World brings this otherwise invisible problem into the spotlight,” said Vindi Banga, president of Foods Unilever. “There is no excuse for chronically hungry children, day in and day out, in the 21st century,” she asserted.
Last year over 760,000 people in 118 countries in 420 locations took part in Walk the World allowing the WFP to provide school meals for 19.4 million children in 71 countries. The cost of feeding a child per day is only 19 cents. Girls are unfortunately most often deprived of education because their families cannot afford to send them to school. Yet education is one of the best ways to escape from the vicious cycle of poverty, illiteracy and poor health.
Those wishing to assist in ridding the world of child hunger may do so by joining a walk or by making a financial contribution through www.FightHunger.org.
