UN hopes AI tech can aid the starving as funding collapses
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Drought in Kenya is creating food and water insecurity. Some 318 million people face acute levels of hunger in 2026 in 68 countries, according to WFP.
PHOTO: EPA
- WFP faces severe funding cuts amid record hunger (318 million people), leading to "brutal prioritisation" and increased deaths, notably in Afghanistan.
- WFP believes AI can boost aid efficiency and prediction by 30 to 50 per cent, optimising delivery and identifying at-risk communities to counter plummeting funding.
- Other UN agencies, like IFAD, are piloting AI apps in Nigeria and Kenya to help smallholder farmers boost production and drive agricultural transformation.
AI generated
NEW DELHI – As tech leaders hail dizzying change and billion-dollar deals at a global artificial intelligence summit in India
UN World Food Programme (WFP) deputy executive director Carl Skau said he hopes that AI can help save cash to stop millions dying of hunger as funding for the world’s largest food aid agency collapses.
“We are struggling everywhere,” Mr Skau said, describing a widening gap between record global food insecurity and a funding pipeline that has been slashed.
“Not enough attention really is given to the global food security crisis and to how those of us trying to address it are struggling at the moment,” he said.
Conflict and climate-fuelled disasters are accelerating crises, with 318 million people facing acute levels of hunger in 2026 in 68 countries, roughly triple the levels seen just five years ago, according to WFP.
The surge reflects overlapping shocks: wars disrupting supply chains, fertiliser and fuel costs rising, and harvests failing in climate-vulnerable regions.
Far from the fast jets and banquet feasts at the summit, Mr Skau said a WFP contractor was killed in South Sudan on Feb 17, shot dead in a grinding conflict in the world’s youngest nation.
Aid work is becoming “more and more dangerous” as conflicts intensify and access shrinks, he said.
‘People will be dying’
On top of that is a financial squeeze.
WFP funding fell by about 40 per cent in 2025, forcing what Mr Skau calls “brutal prioritisation”.
In Afghanistan, WFP funding for food aid has been halved.
“We know that people will be dying through this winter,” he said. “We have had to cut off widowed mothers with many children.”
Similar ration cuts have been reported in Sudan, where a nearly three-year civil war has killed tens of thousands, displaced 11 million and triggered what the UN calls one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, including pockets of famine.
US President Donald Trump slashed foreign aid
Mr Skau said he hopes that AI could help stretch diminishing resources by optimising delivery routes, predicting crop failures and identifying communities most at risk.
WFP’s data chief Magan Naidoo said AI tools are helping in how aid is delivered, number crunching data and complex logistics to ensure “greater efficiency” over distribution systems and improve targeting.
“This is critical at a time when funding is plummeting,” he said, suggesting AI can improve WFP operational efficiency and predictive accuracy by as much as 30 to 50 per cent.
Other UN food agencies, such as the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), are also developing AI to help farmers who are smallholders boost production.
That includes piloting AI-driven apps to guide best practices to become a “central driver of agricultural transformation”, IFAD’s top tech specialist Brenda Gunde said, highlighting test projects in Nigeria and Kenya. AFP
