“It is the first time since 2017 that a famine has been declared anywhere on Earth,” I read earlier this year. The famine in question was in Sudan. Soon after, I read another headline: “Famine confirmed for first time in Gaza.”

As images of emaciated children spread across social media, the question loomed over Western onlookers: What can we do for starving kids halfway around the world?

This story is part of the 2025 Future Perfect 25

Every year, the Future Perfect team curates the undersung activists, organizers, and thinkers who are making the world a better place. This year’s honorees are all keeping progress on global health and development alive. Read more about the project here.

Many tried applying political pressure through advocacy, of course — but that didn’t work fast enough to prevent famine this year. There’s always donating to charity — but a lack of money is not the main driving force behind today’s famines. In the 21st century, famine is a policy choice. It largely happens because of conflict. It happens because fighting makes it too dangerous to get food to those who need it, or because the people in power block lifesaving aid from flowing across their borders.

That poses a moral problem for the average person: You see kids starving. You see the ways in which you seem powerless to prevent their starvation even after you’ve done whatever you can politically or financially. And yet, you somehow must act ethically in the face of that. How?

Inside this story

• Famine has come roaring back this year, but the good news is that simple innovations are making it surprisingly cheap to fight hunger.

• For $94, you can get a malnourished child access to a highly effective treatment program. For $1,500–$4,500, you can save a child’s life.

• Organizations like Taimaka, Alliance for International Medical Action (ALIMA), and the International Rescue Committee (IRC) are great places to donate.

In the spring, while reading a report about highly effective charities, I stumbled upon a nonprofit called Taimaka, which works on treating acute malnutrition in Nigeria. That country is not in the midst of famine, which is only declared when more than 30 percent of the population in an area is acutely malnourished, and when a specific mortality threshold is met. But in Nigeria, like in other countries across sub-Saharan Africa, there’s still a lot of hunger.

I went to Tamaika’s website and saw that it made an extraordinary claim: For just $94, I could get a severely malnourished kid access to its treatment program, which has been shown to help the vast majority of kids recover within weeks. That’s less than my partner and I had just spent on a single dinner from Uber Eats.

But what really shocked me was the cost of actually saving a life with Tamaika’s program, which is a little different. Since not every person who gets treated for malnutrition would have died otherwise, you’ve got to treat a bunch of people before you can assume you’ve actually saved one person’s life. In my reporting on effective philanthropy, I was used to seeing programs — particularly malaria programs, which are among the most cost-effective — that said they could save a life for around $4,000. But Taimaka was claiming that with their hunger........

© Vox