KAROO NEWS - As South Africa continues to battle the spread of Covid-19, the country also faces an onslaught from another equally devastating pandemic, that of hunger and food insecurity.

While food insecurity has long been a problem, with 11% of the population (6,5 million people) suffering from hunger in 2019, according to Stats SA, the measures introduced by government to fight the spread of the virus have exacerbated the crisis.

Last year, SA was placed under one of the strictest lockdowns in the world, essentially forcing the economy to shut down as non-essential services were closed between March and July, says Karl Muller, Operations Manager at the Tiger Brands Foundation (TBF), that has established an in-school breakfast nutrition programme.

"The lockdown was key to curbing the spread of the pandemic, but 2,2 million people lost their jobs. The loss of income has severely affected household food security," he says.
Child hunger remains a huge challenge in South Africa, with Stats SA revealing that more than half-a-million households with children aged five years or younger experienced hunger in 2017. 

According to a study by South African Child Gauge, 11% of children (2,1 million) lived in households that reported child hunger in 2018. While these are the latest official child hunger statistics currently available, it is widely agreed that Covid-19 would have pushed these numbers up significantly.

Muller points out that the closure of schools in March last year also meant that the National School Nutrition Programme (NSNP) was suspended between March and July, resulting in many learners going without a daily meal.

Currently, more than 9,6 million learners benefit from the NSNP.

The onset of the second wave of the pandemic in the country has caused the start of the 2021 academic year to be postponed, bringing additional food insecurity.

“Greater emphasis must be placed on the scaling up of food assistance to people who are hard to reach through the state’s social relief efforts,” says Muller.

The foundation established an in-school breakfast nutrition programme to complement the lunch provided by the Department of Basic Education as part of the NSNP.

"We work closely with the NSNP team, with strict criteria applied to each school prior to the in-school programme being implemented,” Muller explains. We are working closely with partners to deliver and implement an in-school hot breakfast meal to learners, teachers and support staff which complements the existing NSNP."

The Foundation’s in-school breakfast model has been rolled out to 101 schools across all nine provinces in South Africa and provides breakfast to over 74 000 learners every school day. In order to ensure that learners remained well-nourished, the foundation switched to delivering food hampers last year.

“The hampers that the foundation is distributing to learners and their families across South Africa include far more than the usual breakfast. In fact, they contain enough food to feed a family." He adds that while the main benefit of these food hampers is that they provide enough food to feed an entire family, they are also more expensive and thus reduce the Foundation’s reach.

The worst affected are children below school-going age (under the age of five) who in some cases suffer from severe malnutrition and stunted growth.

In 2018/19, more than 800 children were reported to have died in public hospitals and clinics in South Africa from severe acute malnutrition.

“While it is important to manage the spread of the pandemic, we must ensure that the state of food insecurity in South Africa remains top of mind. We must not forget that the country is essentially in the grips of more than one pandemic,” says Muller.

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