Anti-hunger campaign plays up the positive to persuade 'fatigued' donors to keep giving

A new form of anti-hunger campaign – showing the attractive, determined and appealing faces of the needy and once-needy rather than the more traditional images of starving children – was launched yesterday by the UN World Food Programme and the clothing company Benetton.

The aim is to break through the "compassion fatigue" of potential donors by showing the human side of hunger and the hopes and possibilities that food aid can bring. Food hand-outs do not breed generations of people reliant on hand-outs, the "Food for Life 2003" campaign argues. Food aid helps people rebuild their lives and become self-reliant again.

The "lead image" of the €15m (£10m) campaign will be a disturbing image of a man, deliberately maimed by rebels in Sierra Leone, who has an artificial hand in the shape of a spoon. Most of the other photographs, taken in various African countries, Afghanistan and Cambodia, will show faces of defiance, hope or wistfulness, but not helplessness or despair.

The theme is to show that food aid is not a bottomless pit but something that makes a difference to people with the same feelings and aspirations as their wealthier fellow humans in the developed world.

At the campaign launch in Paris yesterday, officials said the aim was "tell the true story of individual human beings: women, children and men whose only chance of escaping from violence, ostracism and poverty depends on their possibility of finding food". The World Food Programme, the UN frontline agency fighting starvation, estimates that more than 800 million people live in hunger. Every day, 24,000 people die of hunger, malnutrition or related diseases.

Despite the efforts made by governments and charities, the WFP says it is losing ground. Hunger is no longer just associated with crop failures in the traditional famine belt of Saharan or sub-Saharan Africa (although the number of hungry people there has tripled). It is often due to war, ethnic persecution, political policies or weather-related catastrophes, and touches almost every part of the world.

At the same time, says James Morris, executive director of the WFP, government budgets for food aid are being cut and voluntary contributions are being squeezed by "donor fatigue". The Benetton-funded campaign, which will appear on billboards and in newspapers in 30 countries, sets out to persuade people that giving money to fight hunger is neither pointless nor thankless.

A series of pictures, and the stories behind them, will try to convince potential donors that food aid is the answer to problems in countries torn apart by war or ethnic violence. The themes are "Food for peace", "food for work", "food to go home", "food for education" and "food for protection." The photographs were taken by James Mollison, 30, a Kenyan-born photographer, who works for Benetton's publicity agency, Fabrica. The stories behind the pictures are brought together in a magazine called Hunger.

The "food for peace" posters, for instance, tell the story of ex-combatants in Sierra Leone – such as Fatima, 23, and Kula, 16, – who are given food to persuade them to disarm and retrain in skills from tailoring to hairdressing. The "food for education" posters show Afghan children, such as Haroun, six, and Arzo, seven, whose families are rewarded with food for allowing them to go to school. "Food for work" shows Afghan women encouraged with food to take part in public rebuilding programmes and re-establish their independence after years of oppression by the Taliban regime. "Food for protection posters" show Cambodian and African women given shelter to protect them from enforced prostitution or sexual abuse.

The stories behind the pictures

Kadiatu, 42, is one of 442 war-wounded who survived attacks by RUF rebels fleeing Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1999. "I couldn't run because Ibrahim [her son, pictured] was 7 months. I begged them not to but they cut off my legs with a machete. I had to sleep with Ibrahim there. We had no food, no painkillers, and we were lying next to the dead bodies."

Sakina, 53, is asthmatic and has difficulty breathing under the burqa. She was beaten by police in Afghanistan for lifting it in public. Sakina now works as a beautician at the Ministry of Women's Affairs, something that was forbidden by the Taliban. Under their regime, women were only able to give each other beauty treatments in secret in their homes.

Phalla, 18, was lured to a brothel in Thailand from Cambodia last year. "They told me that I was going to sell cans ... When we arrived the other women told me it was a brothel and that we couldn't escape." She now lives in a women's refuge, whose location is secret because the fear of repercussions and social stigma is so strong.