The World Food Programme Innovation Lab was inaugurated today in Munich, which I find very exciting. I watched Munich’s entrepreneurial ecosystem grow over the last decade, especially in the past 5-6 years, and today it is one of the most vibrant in Europe, especially for startups that tackle difficult challenges.

So it’s more than fitting, that the lab that focuses on the complex issue of solving world hunger by 2030, one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, should become the first United Nations institution to move to Munich.

Our own work at Eleza.org aims to help disseminate the knowledge and best practices that people come up with everywhere, so I was happy to see many interesting solutions to the challenge of world hunger being presented today.

As Eleza’s story started with a workshop on world hunger at Jim Clark’s WTN conference three years ago, where I chaired a working group on food waste, so I was particularly intrigued by Diana Carter’s Transformers initiative to turn rejected fresh food that would otherwise go to waste into healthy school meals for children in Kenya.

Many other ideas and solutions were pitched before German Foreign Minister Frank Walter Steinmeier and Minister for Economic Development Gerd Müller joined the UN World Food Programme Executive Director Ertharin Cousin in inaugurating the WFP Innovation Lab.

Looking forward to seeing the results.

More on Eleza.org’s history below.

Eleza.org: A Platform to Solve the World’s Toughest Problems

For me, boarding an intercontinental flight is like entering a meditative space. My daily life as a technology entrepreneur tends to be hectic, so having a few hours of uninterrupted time for thinking is wonderful. Or somewhat painful; because I start to reflect critically on what I am doing and why.