Gen Z innovators harness tech to fight South Africa’s child hunger crisis
Sixty of South Africa’s brightest Gen Z innovators spent a week hacking one of the nation’s toughest problems — child hunger — and emerged with breakthrough tech-powered solutions that could redefine how the country tackles food insecurity.
Artificial intelligence, blockchain, data visualisation and community platforms were at the heart of The Biggest Hunger Hack, hosted by KFC Africa. The event invited young digital natives to re-engineer the brand’s Add Hope open-source blueprint, which already fuels more than 3,300 feeding centres across the nation, reaching over 154,000 children last year.
Turning food waste into opportunity
The winning team, Ctrl-Alt-Del-Hunger, created Misfits Mzansi, an app that rescues “ugly” farm produce and redirects it to food-insecure families. The platform also includes cooking challenges, edutainment content and ad-driven donations — allowing users to feed families simply by watching videos.
Other standout concepts included Streetwise scripters, who proposed a social-media-first donation ecosystem featuring real-time dashboards, hotspot maps and KFC loyalty rewards. Their “@KFCAddHopeSA” TikTok-to-Till campaign aims to boost donor engagement through digital storytelling.
Bit Coders built an AI-powered chatbot donation ecosystem using the MTN MoMo API for seamless payments, offering donor insights, tax certification downloads and inclusive donation options. Hack 4 Hope showcased a WhatsApp chatbot built on blockchain, enabling customers to scan a till-slip QR code to donate instantly, with every R2 tracked from donor to meal served through its “HopeCoins” reward system.
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Collaboration fuels innovation
“The Biggest Hunger Hack showed what happens when young digital natives use tech for good,” said Andra Nel, KFC Africa’s Head of Brand Purpose and ESG. “They understand hunger because many have lived it, and they understand technology because they were born into it. That’s the sweet spot for innovation with purpose.”
Business, government and civil society stakeholders attended the Johannesburg event to explore how to scale the solutions nationwide. KFC Africa aims to co-develop pilot programmes with Add Hope partners and showcase results at the upcoming National Convention on Child Hunger.
“Opening up Add Hope as an open-source blueprint has unleashed an outpouring of ubuntu that’s turning this fight into a movement,” Nel said. “These Gen Z hackers showed how tech can supercharge reach and transparency. Now the goal is to turn their best concepts into live pilots with our 128 feeding partners.”
