Hunger Ninjas is a web tool that calculates how bad is the  current draught in South Africa chowing into peoples purses. It will show you that how short your pocket is after you have covered your minimum calories.

To calculate that the tool takes you to a set of questions  for the different income groups and it looks at  inflation, the rand/dollar exchange, the maize price and other variables. HungerNinjas aims to inform journalist, government officials the effects of drought on hunger.
>>Try it out<<
>>Watch the screencast<<

PROCESS

A key tool for our analysis is the Household Economy Approach, a technique for food security assessment to understand households’ ​access to food. In this story we wanted to research and show the impact of the 2015-2016 devastating drought in Southern Africa. In particular, we looked at the effect this drought, when combined with a weak currency, has on the future price of food. We ran models and constructed different scenarios. The outcomes of the spreadsheet scenarios was loaded into a data file that is behind the web interface we presented.

The situation we found looks ​very serious​, to put it politely. In finding out suitable data for a scenarios we were horrified at the situation with food prices. Wholesale futures from the SAFEX bourse indicate a rise of 65% in the 2016-2017 agricultural consumption year, compared with the 2013-2014.

Technologies:
HTML
Javascript
Tons of spreadsheets

BIGGEST CHALLENGE:

“It took some group brainstorming to simplify our ideas and make something focussed and (hopefully) useful. Bringing everyone on to the same page was sometimes a challenge.”

COOLEST MOMENT:

“Seeing the prototype work. Also, we worked out that it could cost RSA over R2 billion more than is being reported in the media.”

FUTURE PLANS

“Make the app into a working calculator that does the number crunching in real time instead of just displaying outputs we had already calculated.”