UN Taps Crowdfunding App to Tackle Refugee Camp Food Shortages
The WFP has responded to a funding crunch by developing a mobile app that lets people around the world donate money to help feed the 4 million displaced Syrians living in neighboring countries. Developed by a start-up in Berlin, the “Share the Meal” app is touted as the first of its kind, allowing people to fund food rations for WFP initiatives in Jordan, to which many of the people escaping Syria's civil war have fled.
 
Why Climate Change Negotiators Should Look to Cities
Cities offer a feasible, field-tested way to dramatically reduce global emissions while saving money, growing the economy, and sidestepping political gridlock. Although cities occupy 2% of the world’s surface area, they generate 70% of global emissions and 85% of global GDP. Thus, action or inaction at the city level is likely to have as big of an impact on climate change as the work done on the international scale.
 
How a Successful Collective of Smallholder Farmers in India Is Showing the Way
A walk through the Kerala seed fest is like a walk through a garden of Eden; okra the size of a hand; purple-colored beans; varieties of chilies from one village alone. The size and colors of the bananas offered make a mockery of the average supermarket. With women and men standing proudly alongside their produce, this celebration of seeds and biodiversity is the future of farming: it is abundant, resilient, and most importantly, smallholder led.
 
Open-Sourced Food Production – the Future of Urban Diets?
MIT’s Open Agriculture Lab is developing sustainable food systems like boxes that create controlled environments to grow specific types of food. Certain combinations of temperature, humidity, and soil can be optimized for certain crops, and that “recipe” can be shared to recreate it anywhere in the world. The technology could be used to create a small home garden to feed a family, or an acre-sized crop designed to feed a neighborhood.
 
How Would Tech Entrepreneurs Recode the Foreign Aid System?
Foreign aid agencies are paying more attention to tech entrepreneurs in seeking solutions to some of the biggest challenges on the planet. According to former USAID administrator Rajiv Shah, “the range of problems that live within the reality of extreme poverty and vulnerability that can be addressed with science, technology, innovation, and the Silicon Valley mindset of ‘can-doism’ tied to capital is really phenomenal.”