Inside The Hunger Project: A Youth Perspective
BY SAMSON SHEN
Hunger remains one of the most pressing and important issues that affects the world today. A report made by the United Nations in July of 2025 said that an estimated 8.2% of the world population, or approximately 673 million people, experienced hunger in 2024. The report notes that this has been a slight improvement from 8.5% in 2023 and 8.7% in 2022. However, the report also warns that climate shocks, continual militaristic conflicts and rising inequality are now reversing these gains, especially in areas such as Africa and Western Asia, which continue to bear a disproportionate hunger burden compared to the rest of the world.
This is a real and dramatic reality for young people, who face the future the world is laying the foundation for. It is very important to note that the young people in the world are not just observers. They form a large and growing demographic with around 16% of the world’s population being between the ages of 15–24, equaling about 1.2 billion people. According to data published by the UN, the number of youth is projected to grow by 7% by the year 2030, making the youth continuously more important when it comes to world issues, especially hunger. This is because the youth are typically the demographic that are more vulnerable to hunger, as the youth experience extreme poverty, food insecurity, and unemployment at higher rates than adults.
Youth are also part of the solution — and they are passionate about creating a better world. According to PwC’s 2024 Global Youth Outlook, “Zero Hunger” is consistently ranked among the top priorities for young people globally. We see youth activists and changemakers around the world. For example, many youth actively take part in the UN’s World Food Programme, contributing to volunteering efforts and spreading awareness in their communities, while many grassroot global youth movements mobilize youth to experience hunger solidarity and fundraise. Another example of youth-led engagement programs is THP’s FeelGood program, which is led by college students who want to use their time on campus to do something meaningful. They run creative social enterprises, like grilled cheese stands, and use the money they make to support THP’s efforts to end global hunger. For this program, it’s not just about the food as it’s also about sparking real conversations with peers and giving students a chance to develop leadership and teamwork skills.
Being a college student currently attending UCLA, I was interested in seeing how I could help, even if minimally, to alleviate these issues. So I’m grateful that over the past couple months during the summer, I was able to have the great experience of interning with the Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) team at The Hunger Project (THP) where I focused on understanding how THP approaches data as well as contributed to the analysis and interpretation of that data. What I found unique about THP’s approach to data collection was that, unlike more clinical or top-down models, the focus wasn’t just on outcomes, but on the process — on what communities themselves are doing, how they define success, and, most importantly, how change unfolds over time through their own leadership.
Hunger is an issue as a very integral part of multiple problems in the world. Hunger plays a large role with every other issue such as poverty, climate change and even education access. Alleviating the effects of hunger will also in turn alleviate the effects of these other issues. Hunger is not a standalone issue as it is woven throughout other major problems. For me, what made my internship at THP meaningful wasn’t simply the technical experience, though I gained a lot, but rather it was the underlying values of THP that focused on communication and community-led change in a commitment to measuring what matters.
In a multitude of ways, my time at THP helped me to better understand the acute effects of world hunger. The broad statistics, such as 8.2% of the world population being affected by hunger, aren’t just abstract facts for me anymore. The Hunger Project has shown me how their data collection and analysis can provide a tangible voice to the people and realities that lie behind them. I realize that young people should not only be able to actively participate in these discussions and analysis, but are also drastically needed in them.
My name is Samson A. Shen. I was born in Naperville, IL and grew up in Long Island, NY. I’m currently a third-year student at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), majoring in Political Science with a concentration in international relations. I interned with Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL), The Hunger Project (THP) during the summer of 2025 and really enjoyed my time there! At school, I’m very interested, broadly, in the study of foreign governments and how they function and interact with each other and with their own people. It is very interesting to see how, even though we are all part of the same species, we live in vastly different political systems with vastly different ideals, yet all with an ultimate common goal of bettering our society. I want to learn how different governing bodies find solutions to tackle global and domestic problems, and to see how they engage and interact with other nations as well as their own people to come up with these solutions. I’m a news editor of The Westwood Review, an online journal start-up and I have research experience on data analysis as well as having several publications including one published by Scientific Reports. In my spare time, I enjoy doing many things, including biking, listening to music, reading and writing, and traveling.
