Earlier this month, the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) and World Vision International announced they will be testing food automated teller machines (ATMs) in refugee camps. Like the bank ATMs we’re used to seeing and using for cash, the Food ATM will dispense locally sourced cereals, cooking oil, and other fortified blended foods with the swipe of a card.
WFP and World Vision say the machines have the potential to “revolutionize providing food to refugees” by eliminating some of the biggest problems associated with the service right now. In an email to UN Dispatch, World Vision’s East Africa Humanitarian and Emergency Affairs Director Chris Hoffman said that as the largest implementing partner with WFP, World Vision has found that at least 30 percent of food baskets given to refugees are lost, sold, or stolen. Safety concerns are also increasing as some refugees have been attacked while transporting the heavy foods they receive from distribution centers to their homes.
Then, there’s the issue of refugees being exposed to disease and sickness when food goes bad because they usually don’t have appropriate storage systems, like refrigerators. Additionally, because the food is generally sourced internationally and transported thousands of miles, the process is very costly for humanitarian agencies and organizations, not to mention environmentally hazardous.
No longer will the food need to be shipped from abroad, packaged and repackaged on-site, and scooped out for the refugees waiting in long lines for their monthly rations. Instead, the Food ATM will be continuously monitored and stocked with locally procured foods, which, in turn, support the local economy and cut costs immensely. It will also allow the WFP to track better what kinds of food and how much refugees use to make the aid more personalized.
The Food ATM consists of several machines containing a specific food item (e.g., one machine for cooking oil and one for cereals). They will be housed in a “clean, cool warehouse” within the camp that refugees can visit whenever they want. In the warehouse, refugees can fill their shopping carts with as much or as little of each food item as they want within the limit of their pre-funded SCOPE card – a WFP digital cash card re-loaded every month. The ease of access means that refugees can only take as much food as they can carry or store safely at home. In the same way that a person’s grocery shopping patterns may be difficult to predict, on-demand distribution of food assistance will make it harder for robbers to know when refugees will be collecting food.
The idea for the Food ATM was developed by WFP’s Nairobi Regional Bureau in collaboration with World Vision. It won a slot at WFP’s Innovation Bootcamp last fall as a “game-changing” idea to tackle global hunger. Just one Food ATM is expected to improve nutrition and safe access to food assistance for thousands of refugees, and if implemented at scale, it could be a global solution to food loss for hundreds of thousands of refugees.
According to Hoffman, the initial six-month pilot will be rolled out this year in Uganda and maybe South Sudan. During the pilot, they will pay particular attention to whether the Food ATM is culturally accepted by refugees and implementing partners. “This is a new idea, and many of [the refugees] have been receiving food in standard ways for many years,” says Hoffman.
For partner organizations, the efficiency of the Food ATM may dramatically cut their staffing needs and require an overhaul of policies and procedures required under the current system. Such large-scale change could become a source of contention. However, if all goes well during the pilot, World Vision, and WFP plans to launch five more food ATMs immediately by the end of 2020 and throughout East Africa over the next two funding cycles; according to Hoffman, their end goal is to completely disrupt the food aid system.
