The Hunger Observatory
01.1 – From visibility to coordinated action
We helped the Pacto Contra a Fome gain clarity on which observatory was worth funding now and which paths were better left unpursued.
01.2 – progress
1 pilot demonstrating, with 9 decision-ready lenses technically feasible, business-viable, and necessary for their audiences.
1 strategic map structuring how the observatory sustains itself, scales, defends its thesis, and secures funding.
1 pre-investment diligence that protected approximately R$1.5M from being allocated to a product unlikely to sustain itself in the real world.
The Pacto Contra a Fome set out to build an observatory capable of identifying where hunger is shifting — and enabling better action.
With multiple priorities in tension, the product stalled. There was a tangible risk of pursuing a redundant path: difficult to use, disconnected from decision-makers, and unlikely to achieve adoption among those who most needed to act.
Contra stepped in before any major capital was deployed. Our role was to build a pilot and a strategic foundation that would demonstrate, in practice, how such an observatory could function — who it would truly serve, and which decisions it would unlock — without burning financial or reputational capital.
We created a protected decision space.
We structured the observatory’s thesis and clarified the real-world questions it needed to answer. We designed and prototyped nine concrete ways of observing hunger, tailored to public managers, private-sector actors, researchers, and citizens. In parallel, we tested different mapping engines and data stacks to ensure the solution would be technically viable, cost-sustainable, and operable by lean teams.
The initiative is led by Geyze Diniz and Maria Siqueira, who convene civil society, the private sector, governments, and academia around a plural council committed to eradicating hunger in Brazil by 2030.
02.1 – Leaving the hunger map was a milestone but hunger changes address when vigilance fades.
In 2025, Brazil exited the global hunger map after reducing undernourishment to below 2.5% defined as prolonged insufficient caloric intake according to the UN’s State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI 2025) report.
And yet, approximately 54 million people still live with food insecurity households without regular access to sufficient and quality food with more than 8 million facing severe food insecurity, meaning hunger in the present tense.
Leaving the map was an achievement.
Remaining off it requires vigilance and new ways of acting.
8.7 million people in Brazil still live in severe food insecurity.
North: 1,6 millions of people
North East: 3,4 millions of people
Central West: 0,6 millions of people
South East: 2,5 millions of people
South: 0,6 millions of people
What we see today is hunger shifting address, cause, and appearance. Brazil does not lack food it lacks access and quality.
Food deserts neighborhoods with limited access to fresh produce, food swamps and areas dominated by ultra-processed products, push empty calories onto the plate. Food inflation erodes income. Cases of childhood overweight and adult obesity rise alongside nutritional deficiencies. Millions remain invisible to government registries without postal codes, outside official statistics.
This is a cumulative crisis. The longer action is delayed, the greater the human and institutional cost: strained healthcare systems, compromised learning, reduced productivity, saturated assistance networks.
Adequate nutrition diverse, fresh, sufficient food is foundational to social stability and local economic growth. Each small correct decision in the right neighborhood alters entire trajectories.
With the announcement that Brazil had exited the hunger map, many believed hunger had ended. Others were unaware of the problem altogether. The reality is more complex. Hunger recedes only through coordinated action across civil society, the private sector, government, academia, and the press.
Acting does not mean deciding blindly.
It means deciding with sufficient evidence at the pace of those who need to eat today measuring impact, learning quickly, and adjusting course in public.
That is where we began.
03.1 – An observatory that orchestrates knowledge, translates complexity, and opens windows of opportunity
The problem was never a lack of technology or data.
It was a lack of accessible orchestration.
The observatory connects public databases, academic research, redistributors’ intelligence, news, and field signals, creating a translation layer that converts technical rigor into low-effort, high-impact actions for both decision-makers and executors.
Each solution was designed to unlock a practical action point.
(There were nine in total — five are highlighted below.)
01. Food security facility managers can reallocate resources with precision
For managers of food and nutritional security facilities, the observatory clearly indicates where resources should be reallocated. Public restaurants such as Bom Prato, gain visibility into underserved areas, including those lacking equipment from other government departments.
This expands territorial awareness and creates real opportunities for interdepartmental collaboration.
02. Political leaders can formulate policies grounded in evidence
For policymakers, the observatory leverages AI to transform complex datasets into ready-to-use policy briefs and legislative drafts.
Within minutes, municipal advisory teams can understand the hunger landscape in their territory and structure public policy proposals including overlap analysis, institutional articulation, and related bills.
In practice, AI drastically reduces the technical barrier, enabling action to begin sooner.
03. Companies are guided to invest where impact is real
We recognized that companies require direction. For the private sector, the observatory functions as a practical guide: organizations of any size can access it and be directed toward investments that generate tangible impact — without needing deep expertise in food security.
For large corporations, it also serves as an immediate channel to structure and organize ESG initiatives with territorial precision.
04. Researchers can move their theses from academia to public decision-making
The observatory builds a direct bridge between academia and public decision-making.
Research remains with researchers. Organizing, communicating, and translating that knowledge for decision-makers becomes the role of the observatory.
Theses that once remained confined to academic circles gain a faster pathway toward real-world impact.
05. Citizens gain pathways to understand and engage beyond statistics
Awareness is not built on statistics alone.
We created pathways that bring people closer to lived realities — translating numbers through alternative lenses that foster understanding, empathy, and civic engagement.
03.2 – Technical and business feasibility
Everything expressed in the pilot is fully feasible.
We tested four different mapping engines in practice, measured cost and scalability, and selected the most sustainable option for the context of Pacto Contra a Fome.
The published views incorporate georeferenced data, structured in a stack designed for lean teams and autonomous experimentation.
Previously, navigating across different indices was nearly unthinkable. Now, it is possible to move seamlessly from a state-level vulnerability perspective to the municipal level and ultimately to the neighborhood.
To enable this, we developed a proprietary index that serves as a proxy to introduce granular decision-making and reveal pockets of vulnerability based on IBGE census sectors. We believe decisions only become truly strategic when they can see the level of detail where public policy actually unfolds.
03.2.1 - Capex vs. Opex
We estimated the order of magnitude between:
Capex — initial investment: product sprints, data integration and publication, testing
Opex — recurring monthly costs: cloud infrastructure, observability, content curation
Costs and operations were made explicit. Maintenance remains lightweight, and growth is predictable as new data layers and traffic increase — without proprietary lock-ins.
03.2.2 - Funding without compromising purpose
Funding pathways were designed to avoid colliding with the initiative’s purpose.
Hypotheses such as privately commissioned research, social innovation services, matchmaking between companies and redistributors, public-sector support products, and bespoke data preparation for researchers proved misaligned or potentially conflicted.
We therefore explored a more coherent structure: a combination of grants (non-repayable funding) and less orthodox mechanisms, such as autonomous communities organized around each “form of observation,” governed through assemblies and supported by incentive-based economies, including performance rewards, community tokens, and crowdtokens to sustain those generating public value.
The result is a model that preserves independence while ensuring economic viability.
04.1 – The capacity to endure political cycles and sustain the fight against hunger without reliance on heroic figures.
The pilot we developed functioned as a reconnaissance team.
We opened passage, mapped viable routes, estimated the resources and costs of crossing, and signaled critical points of attention. Once the terrain became visible, the journey ceased to be a leap into the dark.
The immediate legacy is decision-grade material: “if” and “how” are no longer open questions. From this point on, the conversation shifts to “when,” phasing expansion based on the nine ways of observing hunger.
We envision an observatory with its own stamina — embedded in management routines and social oversight practices. A platform capable of traversing political cycles, sustaining public learning, and providing predictability to partners — governments, civil society, the private sector, academia, and the press — without requiring all actors to master the hunger agenda in advance.
The observatory begins to orchestrate knowledge and translate complexity into action — reducing the effort required to decide and opening windows of opportunity for the approval and improvement of structural policies.
As it consolidates, second-order effects emerge.
The observatory informs training curricula for public managers and communicators; inspires applied laboratories and research fronts; establishes open standards for data and visualization that other actors can adopt; and fosters a community of practice that shares methods, evidence, and outcomes.
Like any robust civic infrastructure, it connects dispersed fronts, prevents redundancy, and accelerates the country’s learning curve.
In this observatory, we integrated nine data sources to compose a more strategic and intelligent ecosystem.
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