How far does a fortune go against the world's biggest problems?

Pick a fortune, a problem, and how long you want to keep helping. The simulation works out how many people that actually reaches — because hunger, thirst and homelessness are annual bills, not one-time purchases. Every figure is a published estimate with its source attached.

Each dot is a slice of the people who need help; lit dots are the share your fortune can reach for the time you chose. The band below states the answer: how many people, for how long.

What you're seeing

The scale of a problem drawn as a grid of people. You set how much money you have and how long you want to sustain the help; the lit dots — and the number in the band below — are how many people that covers.

How to read the graph

You do not choose how many people to help. You choose how long. A fortune spread over a longer horizon reaches fewer people each year; squeezed into a single year it reaches the most. Drag 'For how long' and watch the count trade against the time. The stats also show the two extremes: everyone for a short while, or a few for a very long while.

The key lesson

A billion dollars is vast against one life and small against a whole problem. Ending world hunger costs about $93 billion a year, so even $1 billion sustains everyone for only a few days — yet that same billion could save nearly 180,000 lives from malaria. The binding constraint on doing good is scale, not generosity, and these are recurring bills rather than one-time cures.

Cost per person$127/yr

You can help788K

…for how long10.0 years

Share of the problem0.1%

Or reach, for 1 year7.9 million

Everyone (733.0 million) for4 days

Solve it for all$93.0B/yr

With $1.0B, you could feed 788K people fed for a year and keep it up for 10.0 years. Try to reach everyone — all 733.0 million — and the same money runs out in 4 days. About $127 a year per person — the cost the WFP puts on ending hunger, spread across the 733 million people the UN counts as undernourished.

Source

UN World Food Programme ($93B/yr to end hunger by 2030); FAO SOFI 2024 (733M undernourished, 2023)

Hunger is a symptom of poverty, not only a shortfall of food. This is the marginal cost of relief and food-system investment, not a promise that writing the cheque ends hunger forever.