Top 10 Countries in the World with the Worst Hunger Levels: 2025 GHI Rankings

Hunger remains one of humanity’s most pressing challenges, threatening health, stability and sustainable development across nations. Despite significant advances in global food systems over recent decades, millions of people still go to bed hungry every night.

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2025, jointly published by Concern Worldwide, Welthungerhilfe, and the Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict (IFHV), provides a detailed analysis of this global crisis.

The GHI not only identifies where hunger is most severe but also tracks progress over time, guiding policymakers, development partners and the international community on where interventions are most urgently required.

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The Index assesses hunger through four key dimensions: undernourishment, child stunting, child wasting and child mortality. Together, these indicators measure both the quantity and quality of food consumption and the long-term health consequences of poor nutrition. Undernourishment reflects the share of a population whose calorie intake is insufficient for a healthy life.

Child stunting, or low height for age, indicates chronic undernutrition. Child wasting, or low weight for height, points to acute malnutrition, while child mortality represents the ultimate consequence of hunger, reflecting deaths linked to inadequate nutrition and poor living conditions.

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Each indicator is standardised to ensure comparability across countries and then combined into a composite score on a 100-point scale, where 0 represents no hunger and 100 indicates the worst possible situation. In practice, no country reaches these extremes. A score below 10 is considered low, 10 to 19.9 is moderate, 20 to 34.9 is serious, 35 to 49.9 is alarming, and 50 or above is extremely alarming.

Drawing on data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF, the GHI offers a multidimensional picture of hunger while minimising measurement errors.

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The 2025 report covers 123 countries with sufficient data, while another 13 received provisional classifications due to limited data. Missing data often coincide with regions affected by violent conflict or political instability, particularly in parts of Africa and the Middle East, where hunger crises tend to be most acute.

This year’s findings reaffirm the strong connection between conflict, climate vulnerability and hunger, as well as the widening gap between nations making progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 2 (Zero Hunger) and those falling behind.

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According to the 2025 GHI, hunger remains most severe in countries experiencing multiple overlapping crises. Burundi and Yemen top the list as the world’s hungriest nations, each recording an “extremely alarming” score of 49.9. They are followed closely by Somalia, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where years of instability, conflict and environmental degradation have left millions food insecure.

These results show that hunger is not simply a matter of food availability but a reflection of deep-rooted social, economic and political vulnerabilities that require coordinated global action.

Below is the list of the top 10 hungriest countries in the world for 2025, according to the latest Global Hunger Index findings.

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