Africa has always been the perfect picture of a poor and starving continent at the mercy of developed countries like the United States of America and the United Kingdom. Prime-time television in these countries are daily riddled by slow-mo video clips of sickly, malnourished children backed with melancholic music and pleas to help save an African child.

But an American anti-hunger organization Share Our Strength is flipping the script with a campaign – Great Nations Eat, where representatives of China, Germany, and Slovenia describe the state of hunger and food insecurity in the United States, drawing attention to the fact that America has a greater share of undernourished people than China, Germany, and Slovenia.

Partly inspired by a survey that proves that over 49 million Americans are hungry and living in poverty, the aim of the campaign is to urge America to confront the hunger plaguing Americans. “This was really to try to think a little more disruptively to get people’s attention, to go right to the heart of the issue that people are not aware hunger is a problem in the United States,” said Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Share Our Strength, Billy Shore.

Despite being one of the world’s wealthiest nations, quite a number of families in every community – 14.3 percent (17.5 million) households still struggle to put food on the table. “Hunger exists in every community and it affects the life of 1 in 6 Americans. That doesn’t happen in any other developed nation. It shouldn’t happen here,” said Billy Shore.

This disruptive AD campaign is definitely a jolt to reality for Americans who are oblivious, or just don’t acknowledge the fact that their country has a hunger problem. To them, hunger is a plague that only affects villages in Africa.  The campaign organizers clearly pointed this out in a statement that reads, “The problem isn’t lack of money … the problem is a lack of knowledge about the hunger problem in America.”

Who would have guessed that one of the world’s supposedly greatest countries, that is always seeking aid for other countries, is slipping into mass hunger? Yes, Africa appreciates the help of the wider world, but maybe it’s time America pauses at playing the world’s super hero and fix one of their several problems; of recent, there seem to be a lot of them.