At TEDxChange @ TEDxDelhi, I shared what we learned about how to best address the problems of malnutrition and hunger throughout India so we can ultimately eradicate them.

I was humbled by the insight of the mothers we talked to in villages around the country, and I consider the data we collected to be a salute to them.

Hungama means “to create a stir” in Hindi. It’s also name of the initiative of my organization, the Naandi Foundation, focused on eradicating hunger and malnutrition by shaking things up and changing the way we fight. When it comes to fixing the problems of hunger and malnutrition, we know that one out of two children through the age of five years old, around the world, is in some way malnourished. It’s the “bread and butter” story for many: the story of not having bread and butter for children and their mothers.

But what about what we don’t know?

In order to help young children, and their mothers, we need to know where they are—now. The latest data on children suffering from malnutrition and hunger is about six years old. We knew we needed to come up with new data. So we went to the areas of India that ranked as the most affected by hunger and malnutrition, and we listened. We listened to mothers—100,000 of them—because we knew that the knowledge that would help provide us the information and data about malnourished children lay with these mothers. It’s this data that, we realized, would help us design a program for the nation of India to address hunger and malnutrition, and save lives.

Watch the video below to find out more about our heart-wrenching and hopeful journey through India.

 

Do you have a question for Manoj about his work fighting malnutrition and hunger throughout India? Submit it in the comments below and we’ll post answers in the coming days!