Zero Hunger Accelerator Fellowship

Co-create Local Food Security. End Childhood Malnutrition by 2026.

The Zero Hunger Accelerator Fellowship Program—known as the Kagun Fellowship—is an ambitious, community-driven initiative mobilizing thousands of change agents across the Philippines to achieve two audacious goals by December 30, 2026: reduce childhood malnutrition to zero and increase food self-sufficiency and resiliency to 100% in all provinces. A joint program by the Bridging Leadership Institute, Zero Hunger Lab, and AI for Governance Lab, this program aims to bring AI-augmented leadership and co-creation to the food and agricultural systems. 

Aligned with the Enhanced Partnership Against Hunger and Poverty (EPAHP) Program and the national Zero Hunger agenda, the Kagun Fellowship operationalizes these policies at the grassroots level through rapid experimentation and youth leadership.

This is not another training program. This is a movement where youth leaders, barangay officials, and community champions come together in co-creation teams to rapidly test, learn, and scale solutions that work.

Two Bold Goals. One Powerful Movement.

Goal 1: Zero Childhood Malnutrition by December 30, 2026

Every child deserves to grow up healthy, nourished, and full of potential. Yet thousands of Filipino children still suffer from stunting, wasting, and underweight. The Kagun Fellowship directly confronts this crisis by empowering communities to prototype and implement innovative feeding programs, nutrition education, and food access solutions—testing what works every two weeks and scaling successes rapidly.

Goal 2: 100% Food Self-Sufficiency and Resiliency in All Provinces

Food security cannot depend on external supply chains alone. Every province must have the capacity to feed its own people through local production, sustainable agriculture, and resilient food systems. Kagun Fellows will build this capacity from the ground up, creating community gardens, strengthening farmer networks, establishing farm-to-school linkages, and developing climate-resilient food production systems.

The Kagun Model: Co-Creation Teams in Action

The Fellows

Each municipality will organize at least 21 barangay-based change agents, with a mandatory inclusion of at least 7 Sangguniang Kabataan (SK) or youth leaders. These Kagun Fellows represent the diversity of the community: youth leaders bringing fresh energy and digital fluency, barangay officials providing governance expertise and resources, farmers and fisherfolk contributing production knowledge, daycare workers and health workers ensuring nutrition outcomes, and community organizers mobilizing grassroots action.

Many Fellows will come from community-based organizations (CBOs) registered in the EPAHP Digital Mapping System—the farmers associations, fisherfolk groups, cooperatives, and livelihood associations already connected to institutional markets through EPAHP's Negotiated Procurement-Community Participation mechanism. This ensures that Kagun innovations directly strengthen existing EPAHP supply chains and benefit the CBOs already feeding Filipino children.

The Co-Creation Teams

Innovation happens in small, focused teams. Each Kagun Fellow joins two co-creation teams of 3 members each. This dual-team membership is strategic: Fellows gain exposure to different challenges, learn from multiple perspectives, and cross-pollinate ideas across tracks. Team combinations are optimized to maximize mixing among Fellows, ensuring that youth leaders collaborate with farmers, officials work alongside community organizers, and diverse experiences converge into creative solutions.

Rapid Prototyping: One Micro-Project Every Two Weeks

Forget lengthy planning cycles. Co-creation teams implement one micro-project every two weeks—small experiments designed to test solutions quickly, learn from real users, and iterate based on feedback. Week 1 might test a new feeding program recipe with five children. Week 3 could pilot a farm-to-daycare supply arrangement. Week 5 might launch a mobile nutrition education campaign. Each micro-project builds knowledge, momentum, and evidence of what actually works in your community.

The 14 Innovation Tracks

Every co-creation team selects one of 14 specialized tracks, each aligned with the EPAHP Program's strategic objectives and partner agency priorities. These tracks ensure comprehensive coverage of all pathways to food security, from institutional feeding programs to credit access, from farm-to-school linkages to climate resilience. Per municipality, there must be at least one co-creation team per track, ensuring comprehensive implementation of EPAHP at the barangay level.

The 14 tracks include: Feeding Program Innovation, Credit & Insurance Access, Farm-to-School Linkages, Food Production for Self-Consumption, Nutrition Behavioral Change, Local Value Chain Development, Indigenous Peoples Nutrition Security, Fisherfolk Food Security, Policy Development & Budget Advocacy, Digital Systems Innovation, Gender-Responsive Nutrition, Climate-Resilient Food Systems, Community Accountability Mechanisms, and Emergency Preparedness & Response.

Each track connects directly to EPAHP partner agencies (DSWD, DA, DAR, DepEd, DOH, LandBank, and 25+ others), giving Fellows access to technical support, funding opportunities, and institutional markets. Teams working on Feeding Program Innovation link to DSWD's Supplementary Feeding Program and DepEd's School-Based Feeding Program. Teams working on Credit & Insurance Access connect with LandBank's EPAHP Lending Program and PCIC's agricultural insurance. Every micro-project contributes to both local community impact and national EPAHP targets.

Each track has dedicated social media channels on Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube where teams share their micro-projects, celebrate wins, learn from failures, and discover what's working in other communities. These channels become living libraries of grassroots innovation, accessible to all Fellows 24/7.

The Weekly Commitment: 30 Minutes, Twice a Week

We recognize that Fellows are busy with work, school, and family. The Kagun Fellowship is designed for real people with real lives. Each Fellow commits just 30 minutes per week for each of their two teams—a total of one hour weekly. These can be online actions (joining a video call, posting updates, reviewing other teams' work) or barangay-level actions (meeting with beneficiaries, testing prototypes, gathering feedback, implementing micro-projects).

AI-Powered Support at Every Step

To maximize the impact of every minute Fellows invest, the program provides AI tools accessible online 24/7 to support work at different levels and moments of the Fellow's journey. Whether you're designing your first micro-project at 11 PM after a long day, need help analyzing feedback from community members, want guidance on connecting with EPAHP partner agencies, or are documenting lessons learned on a Sunday morning—your AI co-pilot is always available.

These intelligent tools help Fellows brainstorm solutions, structure their micro-projects, generate interview questions, analyze data, draft reports, troubleshoot challenges, and learn from the experiences of hundreds of other teams. The AI adapts to where you are in your fellowship journey—offering more guidance for new teams in their first weeks and more advanced strategic support as teams mature.

One hour per week. Twenty-six weeks. AI-enhanced at every moment. Hundreds of teams across your municipality. Thousands of micro-projects tested. This is how transformation happens—not through massive one-time interventions, but through consistent, distributed action by committed people supported by intelligent technology.

Why This Works: The Science of Social Learning

The Kagun Fellowship leverages four powerful principles:

Rapid Iteration: Testing small experiments every two weeks means failures are cheap and learning is fast. Teams don't waste months on plans that might not work—they discover what works through real-world testing.

Peer Learning: When teams share their micro-projects on social media channels, every success and every failure becomes a lesson for hundreds of other teams. The collective intelligence of the movement accelerates everyone's progress.

Network Effects: With Fellows participating in two teams each, and team combinations optimized for maximum mixing, knowledge flows rapidly across the network. A breakthrough in feeding programs in one barangay quickly reaches teams working on nutrition education, policy advocacy, and farmer linkages.

AI-Augmented Intelligence: Accessible 24/7 to all Fellows, AI tools amplify human creativity and effort at every stage—from ideation and planning to implementation and reflection. Fellows get personalized guidance tailored to their track, their community context, and their specific challenges. The AI learns from all teams' experiences, surfacing relevant insights and patterns that would be impossible for any individual to discover. This combination of human ingenuity and artificial intelligence creates a learning system far more powerful than either could achieve alone.

Applications opening soon. Follow our social media channels for updates.

Walang Gutom. Lahat Busog. Zero Hunger by 2026. 

Leadership for Convergence

Join the Movement

The Philippines has tried to solve hunger and malnutrition for decades. Programs come and go. Budgets are allocated. Reports are written. Yet children remain malnourished and communities remain food insecure.

The EPAHP Program provides the infrastructure, partnerships, and resources—30 national government agencies working together, billions in funding allocated, thousands of community-based organizations registered and ready. What's been missing is the rapid experimentation engine at the grassroots level.

The Kagun Fellowship fills this gap. It takes a radically different approach: trust communities to innovate, provide them with structure and support, connect them in powerful networks, and get out of their way. Every two weeks, teams test solutions. Every month, successful prototypes scale through EPAHP channels. Every quarter, municipalities see measurable progress toward zero hunger.

By December 30, 2026, we will prove that zero childhood malnutrition is not a distant dream but an achievable reality. We will demonstrate that 100% food self-sufficiency in every province is within reach. We will show that when youth leaders, community members, local officials, and EPAHP partner agencies unite in purposeful action, transformation is inevitable.

This is your invitation to be part of the solution. This is your chance to lead. This is the Kagun Fellowship.