Design and Development of a System to Facilitate Hunger Reduction Among Underprivileged Malaysians

The Global Hunger Index of year 2024 categorized the level of hunger in Malaysia as moderate and reported that more than $2.5 \%$ of Malaysian population are undernourished. Meanwhile, Bernama reported that Malaysians are wasting approximately 16,720 tonnes of food daily. And added that food waste is responsible for 44 percent of the total waste in Malaysia. Given the increasing number of people living in food insecurity, the vast amounts of food wastage become even more striking. To address the universal problems of hunger and food wastage this paper proposes the development of a mobile application that facilitates the redistribution of unserved food from hotels and restaurants to the needy. The proposed solution would enable restaurants, hotels and groceries to register and provide information about the availability of unserved food, and the needy individuals can use a mobile app to locate and book the food from the nearest participating restaurant or hotel. NGOs too can collect unserved food and distribute it to the needy without incurring cost. Agile software development method was used to develop the prototype. The contribution of this study is facilitation of hunger alleviation and food waste reduction in Malaysia and the potential to replicate it other Southeast Asian countries and developing regions.