In my last blog on board director and CEO Leadership needs to advance AI knowledge, I primarily focused on introducing the concept of Sustainability and introduced the importance of AI as an enabler to help solve the UN’s 17 Sustainability goals, and highlighted a number of AI innovations striving to end poverty.
Over the past year in the AI Leadership Brain Trust Series, I have identified over 50 skills required to help evolve talent in organizations committed to advancing AI literacy. The last few blogs have been discussing the technical skills relevancy. To see the full AI Brain Trust Framework and skill list introduced in the first blog, reference here.
We are currently focused on the technical skills in the AI Brain Trust Framework advancing the key AI and machine learning literacy terms.
This blog will explore the relevance of sustainability literacy and explore the second UN Sustainability Goal which is to “end Hunger, achieve food security, and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.”
Every Board Director and CEO has sustainability as a corporate priority so one would hope they are seriously looking at the value of how AI can accelerate and solve many of our 17 sustainability goals.
This blog will explore the second sustainability goal which is to “End Hunger.”
New research published by by the UNU World Institute for Development Economics Research warns that the economic fallout from the global pandemic could increase global poverty by as much as half a billion people, or 8% of the total human population. In other words, this would be the first time that poverty has increased globally in thirty years, since 1990. This stark reality now emerging has catastrophic impacts in our fight against poverty.
Every Board Director and CEO should have budget allocated to ensuring that every child is nurtured and does not go to bed hungry; especially when one out of five children today live in extreme poverty and hunger is a constant reality.
Innovative Ways of Using AI to Advance Sustainability to Tackle Hunger
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be very effective in forecasting food shortages as an active participant in a front line plan to end hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition and promote a sustainable agriculture.
World hunger refers to pockets of the human population who regularly do not get enough food to eat. For the third year in a row, the number of hungry people is on the rise – as of 2020, there were more people facing chronic food deprivation - actually one in every nine people on the planet.
The world produces enough food to feed everyone. So it’s unacceptable that over 690 million people are undernourished, 2 billion don’t have access to sufficient amounts of nutritious food, and over 3 billion people cannot afford healthy diets.
If wealthier countries doubled their aid commitments and helped poor countries to prioritize, properly target and scale up cost-effective interventions on agricultural R&D, technology, innovation, education, social protection and on trade facilitation, we could end hunger by 2030.
Sadly, the number of people experiencing hunger has increased by 60 million in the past five years.
First, lets look at some of the key reasons that perpetuate a cycle of hunger.
1. Unhealthy Pregnancies - with poor health during pregnancies leads to an under nourished children.
2. Poor Nutrition - poor nutrition stunts physical growth, mental and cognitive development and often manifests other health related ailments, like increased asthma, eye sight issues, weaker lungs, etc.
3. Youth Health Problems - chronic health problems keep children out of school
4.Inability to Work - due to a lack of education limits one’s ability to work to put food on the table for the family.
