In South Africa, more than nine million children live in food-insecure households, and according to findings of a local survey, South Africans count the fear of food shortages and loss of income a close second to the fear of contracting the coronavirus. "The novel coronavirus...
By Lelona Mxesibe - 27 August 2020 The Covid-19 pandemic has thrown the spotlight on the importance of the informal economy as a means of survival for South Africa’s 2.9 million citizens without access to formal employment – as well as their resulting vulnerability. This is another...
Yesterday (19 August 2020) the Food Lab together with Community Chest co-hosted a webinar considering the link between human and planetary health. Marcelle Mentor (from Columbia University) highlighted the critical importance of education when it comes to nutrition and noted that food insecurity is not...
Almost 150 days into a national lockdown, what we feared would happen has happened. The recently released National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) Coronavirus Rapid Mobile (Cram) survey has found that South Africans, and worse, children, are hungry, hungrier than they have been in years. This persistent hunger is likely to...
COVID-19 has shown how damaging ill-health can be for the economy. But it has also shown how measures that benefit health (lockdowns) can be seen as bad economic prosperity. A similar paradox is at the heart of promoting better diets. Poor diet is the world’s leading cause...
COVID-19 has revealed the deep fragility of the African food system and brought to the fore prevailing systemic injustices. Some indications suggest that as many as 34% of people in South Africa have gone to bed hungry during the lockdown. In Ghana disrupted food supply chains...
“Many revolutions have been started not because of philosophies, but because of hunger. In Zulu we say that hunger makes people angry. It is easy to whip people into action when they are hungry.” This stark warning about the potential impact that the Covid-19 pandemic could...
A female farmer from Khayelitsha made headlines recently after advertising her fresh spinach on social media. by Erene Oberholzer A 27-year-old female farmer from Khayelitsha in Cape Town recently went viral in South Africa after wanting to ‘feed the nation one spinach at a time’. Yes, Ncumisa Mkabile went...
The Covid-19 lockdown is taking a potentially deadly toll on children, with reported child hunger on the rise and unemployment at a high. Spotlight takes an in-depth look at what this means for young children and asks the experts about potential solutions. In February, Spotlight visited...
A top level report to the Western Cape government paints a stark picture of the lockdown food crisis in some communities.One community reports: "Families are starving, struggling and urgently waiting for food hampers. The situation is very bad." Another says "hunger is going to dramatically increase...