History
Action Against Hunger (ACF) was established in 1979 by a group of French doctors, scientists, and writers. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Professor Alfred Kastler served as the organization’s first chairman.
ACF moved to provide assistance to Afghan refugees in Pakistan, famine-stricken Ugandan communities, and Cambodian refugees in Thailand. ACF expanded to address humanitarian concerns in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, the Balkans and elsewhere in the 1980s and 1990s. Action Against Hunger’s Scientific Committee pioneered the therapeutic milk formula (F100), now used by all major humanitarian aid organizations to treat acute malnutrition. As a result, the global mortality rate of severely malnourished children under the age of five has been reduced from 25% to 5%.
Action Against Hunger – USA was established in 1985 and became the first member of what is now ACF International. ACF International currently has headquarters in five countries – France, Spain, the United States, Canada and the UK. All members of the ACF International Network agree to a charter of principles: independence, impartiality, nondiscrimination, free and direct access to victims, professionalism, and transparency.
In the short term, Action Against Hunger addresses hunger and malnutrition through feeding centers, food and supply distributions and by providing water and sanitation facilities in emergency situations. In the long term, ACF provides training in nutrition, water and sanitation, food security, and health care.. ACF utilizes international experts and over 6000 local (national) staff to develop programs.
Read more about this topic: Action Against Hunger
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.”
—Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)