GLOBAL – The climate crisis is having an increasingly severe impact on both global food security and local livelihoods. The Horn of Africa, for instance, is experiencing its longest-running drought in 40 years. As a result, millions of women and children have become malnourished after losing their livestock and suffering from water shortages and the spread of disease.
However, the international community often focuses on short-term humanitarian solutions to rising hunger rather than committing to long-term investments in agriculture to increase the resilience of smallholder farmers. Smallholder farmers are the backbone of the global food system, as about 500 million small farms, mostly in developing countries, are responsible for producing 45% of the world’s food.
To increase awareness and action on this neglected issue and advance investments into more transformative solutions, activist power couple Sabrina Dhowre Elba and Idris Elba have been using their celebrity status to bring agriculture into the media agenda and right into the heart of several global policy events.
Sabrina Dhowre Elba, a Canadian CEO, model, and activist of Somali descent, and her husband Idris Elba, a British actor and humanitarian, have been serving as UN Goodwill Ambassadors for the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) since 2020. By strategically using their platforms to highlight IFAD’s policy objectives and meet with world leaders, they have brought the issues faced by smallholders into core conversations.
As a result of their impactful work with IFAD, Sabrina Dhowre Elba and Idris Elba were the recipients of an Honourable Mention in the 2023 edition of the UN SDG Action Awards. They are outstanding individuals who demonstrate that the power is in our hands to Unite to Act for transformative change. Their work is having an extraordinary impact towards achieving the SDGs, in particular No Poverty and No Hunger, and helps empower smallholder farmers who are the backbone of our global food system.
