#food-security

🇸🇬 Singapore · Food from the Heart

Every day of the year, volunteer Bread Runners in Singapore collect bakery and hotel leftovers and deliver them to welfare homes, moving 199,000 kg in 2025.

🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia · Saudi Food Bank (Etaam)

Founded in Dammam in 2012 as the first food bank in the Gulf, Etaam runs refrigerated trucks and production lines that turned 245,972 fresh meals from waste into food for 9,118 families.

🇭🇺 Hungary · Magyar Élelmiszerbank Egyesület

Started by 13 friends, the Hungarian Food Bank now collects from about 800 stores and manufacturers every day, and even rescues roughly 350,000 untouched school lunches each school year.

🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates · UAE Food Bank

Launched in 2017 under Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives, the UAE Food Bank diverted 6,275 tonnes of surplus food from landfill in 2025, the equivalent of over 15 million meals.

🇳🇬 Nigeria · ColdHubs

A tomato farmer with no refrigeration has about two days to sell everything. A solar cold room at the market turns that into twenty-one, for fifty cents a crate a day.

🇳🇴 Norway · International Centre for Reindeer Husbandry

Rain falling on snow freezes into a lid the reindeer cannot dig through, and a herder can lose a season's animals to one warm afternoon in January.

🇵🇪 Peru · AGUAPAN (Asociación de Guardianes de Papa Nativa del Centro del Perú)

Quechua and mestizo highland farmers organized into a self-governed association to keep thousands of native Andean potato varieties alive in the ground, not just in gene banks.

🇹🇬 Togo · APAF-Togo (Association pour la Promotion des Arbres Fertilitaires, de l'Agroforesterie et de la Foresterie)

Trains Togolese farmers to interplant nitrogen-fixing fertility trees in their fields, rebuilding soil, income and forest cover at the same time.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Africa Sand Dam Foundation

A Kenyan NGO that has helped drylands communities build 680 stone sand dams across seasonal rivers, banking rainy-season flow underground where it can't evaporate or run dry.

🇦🇴 Angola · ACADIR (Associação de Conservação do Ambiente e Desenvolvimento Integrado Rural)

Angola's first locally-led conservation NGO helps communities in Cuando Cubango secure land and resource rights while rebuilding farms, fisheries and wildlife after decades of war.

🇸🇻 El Salvador · Asociación Mangle

A grassroots community group is hand-dredging clogged mangrove channels to bring fish, shrimp and floodwater relief back to El Salvador's Jiquilisco Bay.

🇧🇩 Bangladesh · Baragangina Resource Management Organisation

Fishing villages around a north-east Bangladeshi haor agreed to stop fishing 170 hectares of it entirely — and within a few years were catching twenty times more everywhere else.

🇧🇴 Bolivia · Fundación PROINPA

In the Bolivian highlands and Amazon, farmers who once planted whatever seed they could buy are now running their own trials, selecting potato clones and cassava on their own plots.

🇧🇷 Brazil · MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra)

Latin America's largest social movement, born from land occupations in the 1980s, has helped hundreds of thousands of landless rural families win legal title to farmland through Brazil's agrarian reform program.

🇮🇳 India · Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group (GEAG)

In flood-prone Gorakhpur, women farmers are turning the city's peri-urban wetlands and fields into working flood buffers that also feed their families.

🇧🇮 Burundi · ADISCO (Appui au Développement Intégral et à la Solidarité sur les Collines)

ADISCO organizes Burundian smallholders into cooperatives and health mutuals so coffee farming builds lasting prosperity, not just export revenue.

🇧🇮 Burundi · Burundi Red Cross (Croix-Rouge du Burundi)

Burundi's first-ever anticipatory cash payments landed in Rumonge days before the November 2023 floods, and the Red Cross's 680,000 hill-by-hill volunteers are now backing a CHF 778,786 flood protocol approved in July 2026.

🌍 Global · CAMFED (Campaign for Female Education)

Young African women who once relied on CAMFED scholarships to finish school now lead a UN award-winning movement teaching climate-smart farming to rural communities.

🇬🇩 Grenada · Cocoa Farming Future Initiative (CFFI)

After two hurricanes wiped out Grenada's cocoa farms, a farmer-founded nonprofit began regrafting and replanting organic cocoa trees to rebuild growers' incomes and the island's signature crop.

🇿🇲 Zambia · COMACO

Zambian social enterprise turning former poachers and subsistence farmers into sustainable growers through its It's Wild! food brand.

🇺🇸 United States · Camphill Village Copake

America's oldest Camphill community, where adults with developmental disabilities live, farm, and garden together on a 750-acre biodynamic homestead in New York's Hudson Valley.

🇬🇹 Guatemala · Asociación Campesina Río Negro Trece de Marzo Maya Achí

Descendants of families displaced by the Chixoy dam are installing 20 solar water pumps so farmers can irrigate heirloom vegetables, including the revived Maravilla tomato.

🇫🇯 Fiji · Live & Learn Fiji

From mangrove replanting to cyclone-ready water systems, rural Fijian villages are building their own climate defences with Indigenous knowledge at the core.

🇻🇳 Vietnam · Centre for Marinelife Conservation and Community Development (MCD)

Along Vietnam's storm-battered coast, fishing and farming communities are pairing mangrove restoration with climate-adaptive livelihoods to ride out the next typhoon.

🇨🇴 Colombia · SWISSAID Colombia

Colombian peasant, Indigenous and Afro-descendant custodians now run community seed houses that together hold over 1,500 native and creole varieties, and in Boyacá farmers just rescued four lost native potatoes.

🇳🇵 Nepal · Practical Action

Community-run gauge readers and telephone chains now give flood-prone Nepali villages hours of extra warning before rivers burst their banks.

🇹🇱 Timor-Leste · Cruz Vermelha de Timor-Leste (Timor-Leste Red Cross, CVTL)

Timor-Leste's own Red Cross has pre-agreed, pre-funded flood actions for six villages, so seed-saving drums, mosquito nets and first-aid kits are already in place before the river rises.

🇨🇴 Colombia · Fundación Iguaraya

On Colombia's Caribbean coast, 27 Afro-descendant and Indigenous fruit-growing families are each getting a solar irrigation system, and their pulp plant is going solar too.

🇦🇹 Austria · Die Tafel Österreich

Founded as the Wiener Tafel in 1999, this volunteer-run network now rescues up to four tons of surplus food a day for people in need across every Austrian province.

🇪🇨 Ecuador · Red de Guardianes de Semillas del Ecuador

Of more than 300 maize varieties Ecuadorian researchers catalogued in the 1960s, this farmer network has been able to find only about 50 still growing, and it is replanting them one season at a time.

🇬🇪 Georgia · Biological Farming Association Elkana

Georgian farmers rebuilt a organic-farming union from 9 founding members into a nationwide network that is bringing indigenous Caucasus wheat varieties, wiped out under Soviet collectivization, back into highland fields.

🇰🇭 Cambodia · Fisheries Action Coalition Team (FACT)

A Phnom Penh-based coalition of Cambodian NGOs helping lakeside communities set up protected fish refuges in the flooded forests of Tonle Sap, Southeast Asia's largest lake.

🇧🇼 Botswana · Ecoexist Trust

Ecoexist Trust helps Okavango farmers protect their harvests and livelihoods so both people and Botswana's elephants can thrive side by side.

🇬🇦 Gabon · Space for Giants

Mobile electric fences are letting Gabonese farmers protect their crops from Africa's largest population of critically endangered forest elephants without conflict.

🇪🇸 Spain · Pau Costa Foundation

Catalan shepherds get paid in meat and cheese, not cash, for grazing their flocks through fire-critical corridors mapped by the region's firefighters.

🇱🇻 Latvia · Latvijas Samariešu apvienība (Samaritan Association of Latvia)

A Riga-based food bank turns unsold groceries from Latvian retailers into parcels for families, pensioners and disabled people who don't qualify for state aid.

🇮🇪 Ireland · FoodCloud

An Irish charity's tech platform connects surplus food from retailers to charities, redistributing hundreds of millions of meals since 2013.

🇿🇦 South Africa · FoodForward SA

South Africa's largest food redistribution network rescues surplus food from farms and retailers and turns it into millions of meals for people going hungry.

🇷🇼 Rwanda · Gardens for Health International

In Rwanda's health centers, families identified as malnourished are trained to grow their own vegetables instead of waiting on food aid.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Kenya Red Cross Society

Instead of waiting for a drought to become a crisis, Kenya Red Cross now releases cash, seeds and water repairs the moment forecasts turn ugly.

🇬🇭 Ghana · NUS Network-Ghana

Ghana had no community seed banks until NUS Network-Ghana set up a pilot at Adawso in 2023, and its newest at Abrewankor now holds 58 local varieties including fonio.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Gift of the Givers Foundation

Founded by Imtiaz Sooliman in 1992, South Africa's largest disaster-relief NGO drills boreholes, runs desalination plants, and trucks millions of litres of water to communities in crisis across Africa and beyond.

🇪🇸 Spain · Fundació Espigoladors

A Catalan gleaning network rescues 'ugly' fruit and vegetables that farms would otherwise discard, turning them into meals and jobs.

🇱🇸 Lesotho · Growing Nations

A Basotho-run NGO teaches mountain farmers 'likoti' planting-basin conservation agriculture that is reviving eroded soils and multiplying maize harvests across Lesotho's highlands.

🇸🇿 Eswatini · Guba

Guba teaches Swazi families to turn small homesteads into thriving, chemical-free food gardens that boost nutrition and income.

🇸🇬 Singapore · Edible Garden City

A social enterprise turning rooftops, malls and void decks across Singapore into working farms so a food-importing city can grow its own greens.

🌍 Global · Tree Aid

Tree Aid works with communities across Africa's Sahel to grow trees and restore degraded drylands, turning shrinking farmland back into productive ground.

🇬🇺 Guam · Guåhan Sustainable Culture

A BIPOC women-led nonprofit is rebuilding CHamoru food sovereignty on an island that imports over 90% of what it eats.

🇹🇷 Türkiye · Buğday Ekolojik Yaşamı Destekleme Derneği (Buğday Association)

Buğday's seed-swap network, running since 2011, now has a dozen Hatay farmers growing local karakılçık durum wheat agroecologically on 100 decares of a chemical-heavy plain.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Hortas Cariocas (Prefeitura do Rio de Janeiro)

Rio de Janeiro's city government pays residents to grow food on vacant lots and school grounds, turning idle urban land into tons of fresh produce for vulnerable communities.

🇺🇸 United States · Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance (NAFSA)

A national network founded by Mohawk seedkeeper Rowen White that reunites Native American nations with ancestral seeds lost to colonization and helps tribes rebuild their own seed systems.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · AB2TI (Asosiasi Bank Benih dan Teknologi Tani Indonesia)

Indonesia's farmer-run seed bank association says its member groups have bred some 3,600 crossed rice varieties, mostly from local germplasm, without waiting on a lab.

🇸🇪 Sweden · Karma

A Stockholm-founded app lets restaurants and shops sell unsold food at a discount instead of throwing it away, saving millions of meals.

🇮🇳 India · Kheti Virasat Mission

A former journalist's grassroots mission is replacing Punjab's smoke-choked stubble fires with mulching, composting, and organic farming.

🇮🇳 India · Kheyti

Kheyti's 'Greenhouse-in-a-Box' gives Indian smallholders an affordable, low-water greenhouse that multiplies yields and incomes.

🇰🇷 South Korea · Native Seedream (토종씨드림)

Native Seedream tracks down the elderly farmers who still hold Korea's heirloom seeds and has collected more than 10,000 native varieties since 2008.

🇲🇾 Malaysia · The Lost Food Project

Staff stationed inside Kuala Lumpur's wholesale market pull perfectly edible vegetables and fruit off the discard line, and in 2025 The Lost Food Project turned 2.9 million kg of it into 8.5 million meals.

🇳🇵 Nepal · Local Initiatives for Biodiversity, Research and Development (LI-BIRD)

A Pokhara-based NGO helps Himalayan hill and mountain farmers run their own community seed banks, keeping climate-resilient local rice, taro and yam landraces from disappearing.

🇳🇮 Nicaragua · blueEnergy

Since 2004, this off-grid engineering nonprofit has been wiring solar power and clean water into isolated Caribbean-coast Nicaraguan communities.

🇵🇭 Philippines · MASIPAG (Magsasaka at Siyentipiko para sa Pag-unlad ng Agrikultura)

A farmer-scientist alliance safeguarding the Philippines' rice heritage by collecting, breeding and freely sharing thousands of traditional and climate-resilient rice varieties.

🇹🇴 Tonga · MORDI Tonga Trust

In Tonga's villages, MORDI Tonga turns community-written development plans into seed banks, cyclone-ready infrastructure, and new income for rural families.

🇬🇲 Gambia · Maruo Farms

A Gambian rice company organizes thousands of smallholders, 90% of them women, into a climate-resilient local rice supply chain.

🇬🇹 Guatemala · Asociación Qachuu Aloom "Madre Tierra"

After a civil war and a flood of hybrid seed wiped out their own, Maya Achi' women in Baja Verapaz started over with 20 families and now guard heirloom corn, amaranth and beans in earthenware jars.

🇲🇳 Mongolia · Mongolian Red Cross Society

When Mongolia's weather service flags a killer dzud winter, the Red Cross wires cash to herder families before the snow, and studies found it doubled the odds they saved their horses.

🇲🇿 Mozambique · Micaia Foundation

In Manica Province, Micaia trained 52 villagers as seed-keeping facilitators, and 196 of the 340 people it trained were women.

🇰🇪 Kenya · One Acre Fund

Nonprofit supplying East and Southern African smallholder farmers with seed, fertilizer, training and credit to boost harvests.

🇦🇺 Australia · OzHarvest

Australia's leading food rescue charity collects surplus food that would otherwise go to landfill and delivers it straight to people who need it.

🇵🇪 Peru · Asociación ANDES (Asociación para la Naturaleza y el Desarrollo Sostenible)

A Quechua-led biocultural park in the Peruvian Andes where six indigenous communities collectively steward more than a thousand native potato varieties in their original mountain landscape.

🇩🇪 Germany · Prinzessinnengarten Kollektiv Berlin

A grassroots collective turned a rubble-strewn Berlin vacant lot into a mobile organic garden, and is now doing it again on a former cemetery in Neukölln.

🇨🇭 Switzerland · Pro Specie Rara

Since 1982, this Swiss foundation has kept old alpine grain, vegetable and fruit varieties and mountain livestock breeds alive by growing them, not just storing them, on working farms.

🇮🇳 India · Centre for Pastoralism

The Centre for Pastoralism works with India's estimated 10-20 million mobile herders to reclaim traditional grazing grounds under the Forest Rights Act and prove that seasonal migration is a sound way to manage rangeland, not a relic to be fenced off.

🇲🇦 Morocco · High Atlas Foundation

High Atlas Foundation runs community tree nurseries that turn arid, degraded ground on the edge of the Sahara into productive fruit and nut orchards.

🇬🇲 Gambia · Sankandi Youth Development Association (SYDA)

A rural youth association is replanting the mangrove green belt along the Bintang Bolong to bring back fish, farmland and firewood for six Gambian communities.

🇲🇱 Mali · Sahel Eco

Malian farmers are turning back the desert and rebuilding food security using centuries-old tree-regeneration techniques revived by a homegrown Sahelian NGO.

🇺🇸 United States · DC Central Kitchen

A Washington DC nonprofit rescues surplus food and trains unemployed residents to cook it into scratch meals for schools and shelters.

🇱🇹 Lithuania · Maisto bankas (Lithuanian Food Bank)

Lithuania's largest food bank collects unsold, edible food from retailers and farmers and turns it into meals for people who need it.

🇸🇾 Syria · Syria Forest Foundation

A Washington-founded diaspora nonprofit is rebuilding Syria's war-battered olive and pistachio orchards, one nursery and farmer cooperative at a time.

🌍 Global · Rikolto

Rikolto partners with farmer cooperatives on four continents to build fairer, more sustainable food value chains from rice to cocoa to coffee.

🇺🇬 Uganda · Ripple Effect

Ripple Effect (formerly Send a Cow) has trained East African smallholder families since 1988 to farm sustainably, restore degraded land and build lasting food security.

🇷🇴 Romania · Asociația Eco Ruralis

Eco Ruralis is growing experimental plots of the nearly vanished Romanian broad bean in two Buzau villages, while mailing free heirloom seed to anyone who joins.

🇭🇰 Hong Kong · Rooftop Republic Urban Farming

This Hong Kong social enterprise has turned dozens of idle rooftops atop malls, offices and schools into working organic farms.

🇫🇷 France · Réseau Semences Paysannes (French Farmers' Seed Network)

A nationwide alliance of more than 70 French farmer and gardener organizations working to keep peasant seed varieties in circulation outside the industrial seed trade.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Save the Ifugao Terraces Movement (SITMo)

A grassroots, almost entirely Ifugao-run movement that keeps the 2,000-year-old, UNESCO-listed Cordillera rice terraces alive by getting mountain farmers and youth back onto abandoned paddies.

🇱🇧 Lebanon · SOILS Permaculture Association Lebanon

A Lebanese permaculture NGO teaches Syrian refugee families to grow food in micro-gardens using recycled grey water, cutting reliance on food aid.

🇸🇻 El Salvador · Salvadoran Red Cross (Cruz Roja Salvadoreña)

In May 2026 the Salvadoran Red Cross triggered its drought protocol on a rainfall forecast, putting cash and trucked water into Morazán and La Unión before crops failed.

🇧🇫 Burkina Faso · Association Yelemani

On an experimental farm outside Ouagadougou, Blandine Sankara's Yelemani association keeps a community seed bank and hosts an annual fair arguing there is no food sovereignty without seed sovereignty.

🇦🇺 Australia · Seed Savers Foundation (The Seed Savers' Network)

One of the world's longest-running grassroots seed-saving movements, linking more than 100 volunteer-run Local Seed Networks across Australia to keep heirloom food-plant varieties alive in home gardens.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Seed Savers Network Kenya

A Kenyan farmer network that has revived dozens of vanishing indigenous crop varieties by building a nationwide web of community seed banks.

🇸🇳 Senegal · Association Sénégalaise des Producteurs de Semences Paysannes (ASPSP)

Founded in 2003 by farmer Lamine Biaye, ASPSP stages seed fairs where Senegalese growers swap local millet, sorghum and vegetable varieties instead of buying hybrids.

🇵🇰 Pakistan · Rural Aid Pakistan

In Punjab's Narowal District, seven solar-powered irrigation systems let farming households ditch diesel, save water and diversify their crops, and 1,280 women were trained alongside.

🇸🇮 Slovenia · Slovenian Beekeepers' Association (Čebelarska zveza Slovenije)

Slovenia's national beekeeping association, whose campaign persuaded the UN to declare a global World Bee Day, still organizes the country's dense grassroots network protecting native pollinators.

🌍 Global · Slow Food

Founded in Italy to fight fast food's spread, this grassroots network now defends local farmers, biodiversity and food traditions in 160 countries.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Soil for Life

Since 2002 this Cape Town nonprofit has taught more than 9,000 people to turn small urban plots into organic food gardens that feed their families.

🇲🇼 Malawi · Soils, Food and Healthy Communities (SFHC)

A farmer-led Malawian nonprofit, Soils, Food and Healthy Communities uses participatory research to spread agroecology techniques that improve nutrition and food security.

🇰🇭 Cambodia · Pteah Baitong

Pteah Baitong sells irrigation as a service, so Cambodian rice farmers share a solar pumping station instead of buying diesel pumps, and a Kampong Thom community now grows two rice crops a year.

🇰🇪 Kenya · SunCulture

A Kenyan climate-tech company sells pay-as-you-go solar irrigation pumps that let smallholder farmers grow food year-round without diesel fuel or grid power.

🇨🇦 Canada · Sole Food Street Farms (Cultivate Canada Society)

Vacant, often contaminated lots in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside became paid urban farmland for people rebuilding their lives after addiction, homelessness or mental illness.

🇸🇧 Solomon Islands · Kastom Gaden Association

For a one-off lifetime fee of $15, any Solomon Islands farmer can join a seed-and-cutting swap network run out of a seed bank at Burns Creek.

🇺🇸 United States · Soul Fire Farm

On 80 acres in upstate New York, a Black- and Indigenous-led farm is training a new generation of farmers of color while feeding families locked out of the food system.

🇰🇳 Saint Kitts and Nevis · St. Kitts Consortium of Farmers & Food Producers (SKCFFP)

A grassroots network is mobilizing St. Kitts and Nevis's crop farmers, livestock keepers and agro-processors to cut the country's reliance on imported food.

🇸🇩 Sudan · Sudanese Environment Conservation Society (SECS)

Sudan's oldest environmental NGO keeps a 113-branch volunteer network running climate-resilience and conservation projects despite the ongoing war.

🇹🇼 Taiwan · Tse-Xin Organic Agriculture Foundation (慈心有機農業發展基金會)

Working with a government seed station, Tse-Xin collected 216 millet lines from Indigenous tribes in eastern Taiwan and returned most of the seed so it stays in the villages.

🇹🇭 Thailand · BioThai Foundation

BioThai has spent nearly three decades backing farmer networks that recover native rice varieties, local vegetables and tropical fruits, and in September 2026 it rallied 146 groups against UPOV 1991 seed rules.

🇸🇯 Svalbard and Jan Mayen · Svalbard Global Seed Vault

A tunnel driven into permafrost on an Arctic island holds a spare copy of the crops the world eats, in case a war or a flood takes the original.

🇩🇰 Denmark · Stop Spild Af Mad

A consumer movement started in 2008 by Russian-born Selina Juul, Stop Spild Af Mad has run more than 200 projects and passed over 300 tonnes of surplus food to vulnerable Danes.

🌍 Global · International Land Coalition (ILC)

Hosted by IFAD in Rome, ILC unites more than 300 civil society and intergovernmental members across 86 countries to fight land grabbing and secure tenure rights for farmers, pastoralists, Indigenous Peoples and women.

🇲🇽 Mexico · Union de Cooperativas Tosepan

Tens of thousands of Nahua and Totonac families in Mexico's Sierra Norte de Puebla run their own cooperative economy, organic coffee, community finance, housing and forests, outside the reach of intermediaries.

🇧🇯 Benin · Songhaï Centre

Songhaï Centre turns organic waste into thriving farms, training hundreds of young Africans a year in profitable, chemical-free agriculture.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Trees for Cities

Trees for Cities plants and cares for urban trees, edible schoolyards and green infrastructure across UK cities to close the tree-equity gap.

🇳🇪 Niger · Sahara Sahel Foods

Sahara Sahel Foods pays rural Nigerien women to harvest native trees and shrubs, turning stigmatized wild foods into a growing regional market.

🇮🇳 India · Under the Mango Tree Society

A Mumbai-based nonprofit trains marginal and tribal farmers to keep indigenous bees, lifting both crop pollination and household incomes.

🇼🇸 Samoa · Women in Business Development Incorporated (WIBDI)

Since 1991, Samoan village women have turned certified-organic coconut oil and hand-woven fine mats into a global supply chain.

🇿🇼 Zimbabwe · Zimbabwe Red Cross Society

Zimbabwe's Red Cross handed drought-tolerant seed and livestock vaccines to farmers in Binga before the 2023 El Nino drought took hold, triggered by a forecast, not a failed harvest.

🇿🇼 Zimbabwe · Community Technology Development Trust (CTDT)

Zimbabwean farmers run village seed banks stocked with sorghum, pearl millet, Bambara groundnut and cowpea landraces that CTDT helped them recover, some of which now sit in the Svalbard vault.