-: So the World Food Programme,
or WFP, as it's known,
serves about 90 million people each year,
15 billion rations of food,
80 plus countries.
Two thirds of its efforts
are actually focused on
the world's most conflict driven countries.
So those are places like Syria, Sudan, Yemen,
parts of Nigeria, Mozambique,
where people are particularly in need of food.
So since 2003,
we've had what we call
a strategic partnership with WFP.
Which means that at the end of each year,
we'll sit down with the Executive Director and his team,
or her team,
and we will agree: where can BCG have the most impact?
So this can result in a series of different projects,
strategic, operational.
The goal in all of them,
or the objective in all of them, is:
how can BCG help WFP have the greatest impact
on the beneficiaries that they're seeking to serve?
So let me describe three recent projects
that we've done with the World Food Programme.
The first one I'm gonna talk about is what we call
the Private Sector and Fundraising Strategy.
So we've actually just completed that
and that was working with the ED and the central team
to develop ways that WFP could raise more funding
from the private sector.
And clearly our understanding
of where corporates are coming from,
what matters to them in the social impact space
and sustainability space,
was extremely helpful here.
There's another piece around corporate partnerships,
or technical partnerships as we call them.
So to what extent might a logistics company, for example,
be able to lend its skills and capabilities to WFP
to help in the supply chain
to deliver food faster, more efficiently,
to areas where it's needed.
And then a third,
very important strand to this programme
was individual giving.
So to what extent could we
create the brand awareness,
develop the digital capability
and campaigns and so forth,
to really develop an individual giving strategy
beyond what they're already doing today.
The second programme to talk about, perhaps,
is what we call the Innovation Accelerator.
So back in 2015,
we set up the Innovation Accelerator in Munich, with WFP.
What it's designed to do
is to develop new responses
to the challenges of global hunger,
through an innovation sprint type approach.
We've so far developed 20 plus projects,
which we're now developing or scaling up
to roll out and really develop the impact.
But it's BCG's experience
of developing such accelerators
in many other large companies
that's enabled us to really bring that
and help WFP develop it for themselves.
The third project I want to talk about
is one called Smart Simplicity.
Smart Simplicity is an approach that we've developed
and used very successfully in the private sector.
When you have a complex problem
with a complicated set of solutions,
Smart Simplicity enables you actually
to break through, develop a solution,
and deliver change.
We brought the set of skills and capabilities
that underlie our Smart Simplicity approach
to the context of child stunting.
Child stunting is a very significant issue
in a number of African countries.
In Tanzania, it's at about 34% and doesn't budge.
If your child is stunted,
and that will happen between the age of naught and two,
they will be cognitively impaired and
more susceptible to non-communicable diseases
for the rest of their life,
and it has actually a pretty significant 10-12% impact
on economic development of a country.
So it's a very real problem,
it's called hidden hunger
and it's not something we see very much
in the Western world.
As you can imagine,
it's not a new problem,
but it is complicated
and it does have a complex set of solutions.
And what's going on in countries like Tanzania
is there's a lot of money coming in
from other governments and development partners, et cetera,
and a lot of people doing all sorts of things
to try and resolve it,
but the needle's not moving.
And we've brought Smart Simplicity
to bear in that context,
with WFP and with the Tanzanian government
with quite significant success.
We are starting the programme in Rwanda as well,
with WFP.
I mean, that's the way that you can really
begin to create change
and have an impact on this SDG #2,
ending hunger in the world.