Sara Menker and Gro Intelligence Are Tackling Global Hunger and Income Inequality
Gro Intelligence, an MIT Media Lab spinoff, is challenging the status quo on global hunger and income inequality. Using a series of high-impact videos, the company uses the Internet to empower people everywhere with information about how the Internet can be used to help, rather than hurt, the struggle against hunger and income inequality. Gro Intelligence has produced videos in India, Argentina, Uganda, Zambia, Kenya, Botswana, Ethiopia, Nigeria and the Philippines, tackling the causes of hunger and income inequality.
Gro Intelligence uses the Internet to empower people everywhere with information about how the Internet can be used to help, rather than hurt, the struggle against global hunger and income inequality.
Sara Menker and Gro Intelligence, the Boston company behind an innovative technology that allows people to make a difference, are going where no one has gone before. Menker, a partner at Deloitte and the former head of the nonprofit Groint, and Gro Intelligence co-founders Ben Johnson and Andy Lippmaa, former co-founders at the New Media Agency, created their venture in response to an open letter signed by 1,500 experts to President Obama last year, asking him to use his power to tackle the biggest food crisis that our children have ever seen.
“The letter put a spotlight on the fact that hunger is a global problem, it’s not just a U.S. problem,” says Menker. “While hunger is a poverty issue in developing nations, it is also a growth issue for developed nations.” As a result, she says, developing nations are growing the fastest while developed nations are experiencing the highest rates of global hunger.
“That is not sustainable,” says Menker, who has led Groint since 2001. “There is a need to address both. We have not been able to solve the problem for several centuries; the challenge