Our Story

Ceres2030 is a collective endeavor aimed at supporting the international effort to end hunger, and what role foreign aid donors can play in supporting this effort effectively. Today, one in nine people on our planet live with hunger, and the past few years have shown that the number of hungry people is increasing, rather than abating. If donors and governments are to give more money to tackle hunger, just how much do they need to spend and what does it need to be spent on?

These questions are central to the United Nations’ commitment to achieving “Zero Hunger” by 2030, the second of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted in 2015. SDG 2 presents hunger as a multi-dimensional problem: on meeting today’s caloric needs to end starvation, while also ensuring that people have the food security to feed themselves and their community in the long term. SDG 2 also highlights the essential role of nutrition in ensuring that people thrive, not just survive, as well as the importance of preserving the environment so that current and future generations will have the natural resources to feed themselves.

As a first step to answering how much it will cost to realize SDG 2 and where that money should be spent, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) teamed up with the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) to publish the study Ending Hunger in 2016.

Ending Hunger was a first step, and now we plan to dig deeper. SDG 2 has various targets, two of which Ceres2030 has the capacity and resources to analyze more deeply: (i) SDG 2.3: How do you double the income of small-scale food producers? and (ii) SDG 2.4: How do you do so sustainably? We want to know which interventions are effective in supporting the achievement of these targets and we want to model how these interventions affect the wider economy.

This is where Cornell University joined us. To improve the quality of interventions to end hunger, we need to know what the research can tell us about policy interventions and their effectiveness. Agricultural and food research spans millions of articles, thousands of journals, and dozens of repositories. The literature includes peer-reviewed studies from renowned research institutes and reports authored by NGO field staff based on project evaluations for donors, with a vast range of quantity and quality.

Ceres2030 is using machine learning to create a database that brings research together. The database is designed to unlock evidence for decision-makers who want to address specific policies. The method makes it easy to keep track of and incorporate emerging research as it is published, as well as visualizing and sharing findings through a dashboard and app.