The "Silent War": Why Big Hearts Aren't Enough to Feed the World

Some glimmers of innovation hope from the other Munich security conference

Munich last week was even busier than usual. On one side of town, the Munich Security Conference (MSC) was in full swing. Platform speeches, high-stakes diplomacy, and hushed conversations about a world that’s moved beyond its VUCA label.

VUCA? Volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous – terms used by the Pentagon in 2001 to frame the challenges posed by the September 11^th catastrophe.

But now we’re living in a BANI world – one which is Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, and Incomprehensible. And while we might smile at the proliferation of acronyms the underlying sense of crisis is inescapable.

That wasn’t the only crisis game in town. Just a few blocks away a different kind of security threat was being discussed. The World Food Programme’s annual Innovation Forum brought together another concerned audience, worried about tackling the silent conflict of global hunger.

The common thread? Both rooms agreed that the old ways of working are broken. In a world where the environment is increasingly hostile and where resources are tighter than ever, we don’t just need better plans; we need innovation.

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We always have done, of course. And since its founding in 1961 as a UN agency tasked with relieving the huge problem of global hunger and food insecurity the WFP has been central to efforts to try and find novel ways of doing so. From pioneering the first humanitarian airlifts 60 years ago, WFP has had an eye for innovations that can help disrupt global hunger and advance the Sustainable Development Goals.

In many ways its efforts resemble a giant laboratory for the idea that necessity is the mother of invention. But big hearts and good intentions don’t feed 318 million people. Innovation has to be more than a slogan; success requires a core enabling process to translate a “glimmer of a good idea” into measurable value.

WFP was one of the humanitarian agencies to recognise early that anyone might get lucky once but if innovation is to make a difference then it needs a core enabling system. It has built on a host of innovation experiments and since 2015 has concentrated its efforts in the WFP Innovation Accelerator. Based in Munich but operating across the globe in close to a hundred countries and with 17 satellite country innovation units. As well as providing the venue for the Innovation Forum last week.

Innovation needs a system

What we’ve learned from over 100 years of research and many times that in hard-won experience is that successful innovation needs a core enabling process to translate ideas into value. And it needs a system to capture and support the behaviours which help that to happen. Not just as one-off actions but as embedded ‘routines’, structures and processes which become ‘the way we do things around here’ and which enable organizations to deliver a steady stream of innovation.

Since 2021 we’ve had an international standard – ISO 56002 – to help codify this learning. It offers a configurable roadmap for building a system to enable innovation and repeat the trick. But the blueprint isn’t enough; it has to be put into action. Not least in those areas where innovation really is a matter of survival.

Critically WFP – alongside other UN agencies with similar missions like UNICEF, UNDP and a host of other organizations like the Red Cross, Save the Children, Medecins Sans Frontieres – recognised early that innovation has to be more than a slogan. Big hearts don’t change the world but a steady stream of good ideas carefully nurtured, piloted and scaled can make a difference. Innovation matters – but it needs managing.

WFP’s Innovation Accelerator maps well to the ISO 56002 standard, operating as a system which delivers a steady stream of high-impact innovations. It has evolved in its ten years of operation to become a high-performance engine reaching over 104 million people each year. Success is not measured in commercial terms but in impact on the simple but desperately important Sustainable Development Goal – Zero Hunger. The target is sadly still a long way from being met but WFP’s innovations are gaining some traction. Estimates suggest a positive impact on the lives of over 40 million people in 88 countries.

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The Innovation Accelerator as an engine for innovation

Embedding innovation takes a number of forms. At its heart it offers a combination of venture capital, a high-tech incubator, and a boot camp to train and develop capacity for innovation. It’s a space where WFP “intrapreneurs”—staff from the front lines—and external players can come to “sprint” from an idea to a pilot in months rather than years. And importantly it addresses the big problem common to many innovation efforts in this sector – that of scaling for impact. The sector is full of ‘promising pilots’, great ideas which demonstrate their value at small scale but don’t grow. A big part of the WFP challenge is to spread these across a much wider ‘market’ of urgent need around the world.

Since 2015 it has supported over 500 ventures and innovation teams across more than 90 countries and hosted over 200 Innovation Bootcamp teams. It has also catalysed close to $400m in finding for innovation projects. This systematic “learning journey” has turned Munich into something of a global beacon for social innovation. It was recognised in 2021 by Fast Company as one of the world’s ‘Most Innovative Companies (Not-For-Profit)’ and, perhaps more important, as one of the best places for innovators to work—an accolade usually reserved for Silicon Valley giants, not UN agencies.

It’s also active in helping share what it has learned; in collaboration with other innovation ‘front-runners’ like UNICEF and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is co-ordinates the UN Innovation Network, developing a community of practice across the whole UN system and beyond.

It’s also learned some important lessons about innovation on the way. Not least that while innovation may sometimes take advantage of powerful new technologies – think AI or drone delivery - it is often a matter of careful adaptation of well-known and easily available resources. A good example of this ‘frugal’ but high impact model is Clean Cooking, an innovation that transforms recycled plastic waste into heat retention bags. This innovation has been piloted in Haiti and Chad, where school canteens tend to cook on open fires with firewood or charcoal. The heat retention bags offer a simple yet effective solution that can save up to 70 percent of energy needs in school canteens. It significantly reduces cooking time from 5 hours to 30 minutes, preventing cooks from being exposed to smoke.

Another myth it’s worked hard to dispel is that innovation belongs to the experts; WFP has pioneered an ‘intrapreneur’ approach which encourages staff across it global operations to create and deploy their own ideas, building on their rich understanding of the operating context. Examples include tools like Payment Instrument Tracking, Optimus and the Farm to Market Alliance – innovations which cover a wide range of challenges aimed at dealing with the many causes of hunger and weaknesses in the current food supply system.

Part of the capacity-building within the Accelerator is about equipping social innovators with advanced tools and techniques transferred from successful commercial practice. – for example deploying lean start-up or human-centred design principles. These approaches are built around interaction and learning within the communities in which the innovation is deployed, piloting as early as possible and then pivoting to adapt to local needs.

A good example is the successful SMP PLUS innovation, an AI-based system to support school meals provision which optimizes menus and creates more affordable, nutritious, and local meals. This is a tricky problem, requiring the balancing of nutritional requirements, local food availability, and tight budgets. Before its deployment planners would often spent weeks manually calculating nutrition and cost; now of School Meal Planner Plus can generate an optimized, culturally appropriate menu in minutes. It currently serves close to 4 million children; crucially a key design principle was the involvement of local communities in menu planning.

By optimizing menus to include locally available produce, the tool supports smallholder farmers and stimulates local markets while ensuring children receive the exact vitamins and minerals they need to grow. In countries like Bhutan and Colombia, the tool has significantly reduced the cost per meal while increasing nutritional diversity. This efficiency allows the WFP to feed more children with the same amount of funding. As the project scales globally, it is transforming school feeding from a simple logistics exercise into a sophisticated public health and economic development strategy.

The scale challenge is of particular significance and WFP has been in the forefront of exploring the barriers to scale and trying to dismantle them. They’ve incorporated much of this learning into their advanced Scale Enablement Programme, designed to support the next stage of innovation once an idea has been successfully launched at pilot scale. It offers a mix of flexible financing, technical support, capacity building and connection to skilled and experienced mentors.

Their approach to scaling seems to work. A good example is the ‘Building Blocks’ programme which makes use of blockchain technology to help distribute cash-based assistance without the need for traditional bank accounts or physical vouchers. It was launched as a pilot in 2017 in Jordan’s Azraq refugee camp, where it offered refugees the ability to visit participating grocery stores and have their identity verified via an iris scan; the transaction was then recorded on a private, permissioned blockchain.

The impact of this innovation has been transformative. By removing financial intermediaries, the WFP has saved millions of dollars in transaction fees—savings that are redirected back into food assistance. Beyond cost, it provides beneficiaries with greater dignity and data security; their financial history is stored on a decentralized ledger, ensuring they have a “digital identity” that remains with them even if they are displaced again.

What began as something of a ‘moon-shot’ idea in 2017 has since scaled to the point where it is now a cornerstone of WFP’s digital infrastructure. During 2024 it was deployed to support over a million refugees in countries like Jordan and Bangladesh and by 2025 was being used by 159 organizations across multiple countries to coordinate assistance. Estimates suggest that since 2022 it has saved a collective $287 million by providing a single secure platform for aid agencies and avoiding unintended overlaps in assistance. The model is now being explored by other agencies to support their assistance programmes beyond food.

Another good demonstration of the journey from idea to impact at scale is the H2Grow programme which enables vulnerable communities to grow food in environments where traditional agriculture is impossible—slums, deserts, and refugee camps. Using hydroponics the project uses 90% less water than traditional farming – and at a time when climate change and water scarcity is making areas of the planet into hostile environments this offers a valuable alternative.

A key aspect of H2Grow is its ‘frugal’, low-tech approach, using kits which the innovation team helped develop and which make use of local materials, such as plastic buckets and wood offcuts. This helps enable families to grow animal fodder or fresh vegetables for themselves even in difficult environments. For example in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria, it enabled refugees to grow fresh fodder for their goats in the middle of the desert, significantly increasing milk production and family income.

H2Grow has scaled to over 20 countries, reaching more than 75,000 people and moved the story from being one of providing aid to one of building self-reliance.

A key challenge in innovation is ensuring the potential ‘innovation space’ is explored as thoroughly as possible. There’s plenty to do in the provision of food and support, and plenty more in improving the various processes involved in delivering food assistance. But there’s also scope in, for example, the financing models used to enable WFP operations. That’s very much the story of ShareTheMeal, a fundraising app, designed to make “Zero Hunger” a goal that anyone with a smartphone can contribute to.

Launched in late 2015, it was the first project to pass through the Accelerator. It was designed to enable users to “share their meal” by donating as little as US$0.80—the global average cost to feed one child for one day. Its power lies in part in the way it connects users with the problem they feel motivated to help with, showing them which project their money is supporting and tracking its progress over time.

Its first campaign supported schoolchildren in Lesotho and over 52,000 users across Germany, Austria and Switzerland helped provide more than 1 million meals; in the following year users helped share over 1m meals with pregnant women and nursing mothers in Syria.

By 2025, the community has shared over 220 million meals, supporting major emergencies in Yemen, Syria, and Ethiopia. It offers a good example of what is called ‘position innovation’ exploring new ‘market’ opportunities by changing the story and to whom it is told. SharetheMeal effectively tapped into the millennial and Gen Z donor base, moving fundraising away from traditional high-barrier philanthropy to a model of micro-donations and social engagement. It also paved the way for other crowdfunding approaches and was awarded global recognition as one of Google’s ‘App for Good’ and on Apple’s ‘top apps in the ‘Making a difference’ category in 2020.

A final example of high impact innovation emerging from the Accelerator is the SCOUT programme, offering an AI-based tool to help improve complex logistics. Using AI to provide a ‘forecasting engine’ has already cut planning costs by 10% and saving $6m in its first two years of operation. The target now is to move that to $25m/year, emerging from the ability to make smarter choices about what to deliver, when, and how, ensuring resources are reinvested directly into reaching more people.

What’s next?

The annual Innovation Forum isn’t just about celebrating past successes; it’s also about enabling the future. A key element involves bringing together influential investors and brokers with aspiring innovators. Promising early stage innovations are showcased along with the passionate teams who created them and who will provide the energy to take them forward. Their pitches offer a glimpse into the future and reassurance that the innovation engine is still running at full speed. They also include a number of ‘wild cards’ – entries which offer bold but high risk solutions which hopefully might provide an element of (positive) disruptive innovation, shaking up old models and challenging new directions. (Significantly some of the success stories above , like SCOUT, began life as wild card picks)

This years ‘crop’ included:

· Jangala -a portable, “plug-and-play” device that provides scalable Wi-Fi to entire communities and emergency teams in seconds. It’s a wildcard because it treats internet access not as a luxury, but as a critical infrastructure for survival—enabling families to find loved ones and aid workers to coordinate in “blackout” zones.

· Remer - a bio-formula innovation designed to improve soil health and crop yields in areas scarred by conflict or climate change.

· The Toothpick Project - uses specialized bio-herbicide technology to combat Striga, the most destructive weed infestation in Africa. It offers a low-cost, chemical-free way for smallholder farmers to protect their livelihoods from a silent, green enemy.

· Sustainable Fuel from Water Hyacinth – turning a problem into a solution by harvesting the invasive water hyacinth which chokes waterways and destroys local fishing. It uses thqat as the raw materials for bio-briquettes, provding an affordable, safe, and sustainable cooking fuel.

· Anomaly Detection in Assistance Delivery (ADAD) - using AI to police data in real-time, hunting for irregularities and fraud in aid distribution.

Meeting the security challenge

Both events in Munich last week remind us that the challenge of innovation is bigger than ever. Not least because just when the world feels most insecure the resources available to innovate are stretched more thinly than ever. Squaring that kind of circle is tricky, to say the least – but it’s a space in which agencies like the WFP have always worked. Theirs is a world where ‘crisis-driven innovation’ is the norm. And the lessons they’ve been learning about how to put in place a robust but flexible system for continuous innovation have relevance, not just for other actors in the humanitarian space but for any organization trying to mobilise ideas to create real value in the world.

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