How A Facebook Sticker Is Helping Spread Awareness And Raise Funds To Fight Global Hunger

By Mayank Jain:

As many as 921 million people in the world go hungry to bed every night and most of them have been undernourished for a sizable portion of their lives. World hunger is not just another problem to solve, but a tangled web of socioeconomic challenges that obstruct each other when we start moving towards solutions from one end and completely overlook the plight of those at the lowest rungs of the hierarchy. Poverty perpetrates diseases and healthcare expenses drives people into poverty once more; the dream of a wholesome meal remains unfulfilled.

The problem with global issues that plague human development is more about apathy and lack of awareness than of the resources. Raising awareness about issues has always been tricky since the common methods fail to capture people’s attention for a long time and become shelved headlines in editorial pages of a few dailies. Pusheen, one of the most popular cats in the world, which came in our lives through Facebook stickers and made our chats a little more interesting with her antics, is now on a mission to spread awareness on the issue of world hunger and malnutrition.

Could a Facebook sticker end world hunger? Possibly not, but it can definitely help spread awareness and raise funds for organizations working towards it. An imaginative campaign inaugurated by the United Nations World Food Program in collaboration with Pusheen aims to bring the focus back on the plight of those who go without food even as millions of tonnes of it gets wasted every year.

The initiative is a simple awareness drive that banks upon the popularity of Pusheen as an everyday cat which can deliver the message of malnutrition and hunger conclusively with its expressions and emotions.

In the stickers, Pusheen is seen eating cereal from a bowl labelled WFP, preparing flour, enjoying a cup of coffee and flying in a helicopter, again stamped with the WFP label. Raising awareness about something like hunger in a way that appeals to people is definitely an example of innovation that captures people’s imagination.

Launched in November of 2013, it has been running for almost a year now and the issue has definitely caught on among people as they often notice the WFP logos nicely stamped on the stickers that they send or receive.

In addition to generating eyeballs for the campaign and the cause, Pusheen also announced through a blog post on their website that they will be contributing 36,000 meals to children fighting hunger through the World Food Program USA. The collaboration has managed to keep hopes alive about solving crucial issues that we have always taken for granted.

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