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Date: November 5, 1999
President of Freedom from Hunger to Speak at Woodrow Wilson School
Princeton, NJ -- Christopher Dunford, president of Freedom from Hunger, a nonprofit group that provides sustainable self-help solutions to combat chronic hunger and poverty, will give a talk titled "A 'Perfect' Solution for an Imperfect World: Microcredit in the Garden of Good and Evil" at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs on Wednesday, November 17, at 4:30 p.m. in Robertson Hall, Bowl 1.
Freedom from Hunger, which finds innovative ways to equip families with resources they need to build futures of health, hope and dignity, has more than 50 years of experience in developing self-help solutions to the problem of chronic hunger. Their "Credit with Education" program, a self-financing lending strategy for rural women that simultaneously provides education on health and nutrition issues, has empowered more than 100,000 families to break the cycle of hunger. The program is in place in West Africa, East Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.
Dunford, who joined Freedom from Hunger in 1984 and has been its president since 1991, was trained as an ecologist and sociologist, earning a bachelor's degree from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. He began his career in 1975 as a program officer with the United Nations Environment Program and later became a land use planning consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, and the Peace Corps, among other organizations. He spent several years in East Africa in the late 1970s and is the author of many articles and publications on strategic planning and the evaluation of rural development programs. Dunford is one of the chief architects of the design and implementation of the "Credit with Education" strategy.
The lecture is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School.