The post-COVID future for South Africa’s women remains unclear
It has become apparent that women around the world are, as a ripple effect from persistent systemic inequities, being disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated economic slowdown.
But now the disease appears to be on the wane in many places, including South Africa. That raises questions as to how those inequalities are going to be addressed in the post-COVID world. Not just to buffer women (and children) against the next crisis, but also to improve their everyday situations.
The spread of the coronavirus appears to be on the wane in many places, including South Africa. How will the inequalities exposed by the pandemic be addressed in the post-COVID world?
SA has been leaving too many behind before and during COVID-19
Gender gaps have increased as a result of the Covid-19 crisis. This has implications not just for women, but for their households and for their children.
Lockdown journey to investigate the potential of marama as a food crop
As large parts of Africa struggle with food insecurity and hunger, the search is on for crops that could provide an answer to these problems.
While the rest of the country was under hard lockdown, researchers at the Centre of Excellence in Food Security at UWC, undertook an exhaustive and exhausting trip in Limpopo in July 2020, in search of the marama seeds
Times have been perilous for farm women and waste pickers
The Centre of Excellence in Food Security is hosting a series of 2020 Women’s Month Webinars over August, the first of which, held on 13 August 2020, focused on the precarious livelihoods of farm women and waste pickers.
A mother in tears because she has a loaf of bread to eat but not enough money to send to her children in another town or city, or even country. Stories like this one, as recounted by waste picker Eva Mokoena, typified what was happening around the country amid the COVID-19 lockdown.
WANTED: Programme Manager (COVID-19 response) Pilot Programme
Programme manager wanted for a pilot programme that will see a consortium of partners unite to deliver a COVID-19 response programme, focussed on food security and community engagement. The pilot will implement a two-pronged approach; a digital food voucher distribution intervention through informal food traders coupled with the Champion Model, a community engagement methodology.
SA’s “inappropriate legislation” out of step with global COVID-19 opinion
The government has come in for a tongue-lashing over its “inappropriate” COVID-19 regulations, with one of the country’s top social development economists warning that rather than bringing the pandemic under control, economic micro-management will instead exacerbate the suffering of the poor.
While stopping short of addressing the alcohol and cigarette ban specifically, Professor Julian May told a virtual conference attended by hundreds of people from across the world that the loss of jobs and desperately needed revenue to the state would negatively impact the critical funding of social protection programmes going forward.
Adults are going hungry to shield their children, in a reality where 34% of people reported they had gone hungry or went without anything to eat on at least one day during the Level 3 lockdown.
Food Dialogues 2020: Building healthier, resilient and just food systems
The Food Dialogues: Cape Town 2020 initiative, which takes place until 14 August 2020, is set to focus on the Covid-19 pandemic and the impact it has had and will have on Cape Town’s food system.
The digital summit will bring together a diverse and inclusive range of voices to engage in key issues intimately connected to the food we eat and the future of food.
Basic income grant a timely intervention for SA, researcher says
As countries and citizens across world navigate through the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic – including its impacts on livelihoods, food security, poverty and unemployment – plans to introduce a Basic Income Grant (BIG) for South Africa’s unemployed could not have come at a better time.
Evidence from around the world suggests that social grants can contribute to increased economic activities and labour market participation
The announcement by Social Development Minister Lindiwe Zulu, government’s plan to introduce a Basic Income Grant, targeted specifically at unemployed non-grant recipients between the ages of 18 and 59, “is important because this has always been a major gap in SA’s otherwise comprehensive social protection system.” So says Professor Stephen Devereux, who holds the SA/UK Bilateral Research Chair in Social Protection for Food Security and is affiliated to the Centre of Excellence in Food Security at the University of the Western Cape.
Despite SA’s comprehensive social grant system, one in four children in South Africa remain stunted, Devereux says. We have high rates of child malnutrition in SA, partly because the CSG – which reaches 12 million children – is being diluted among other family members, including unemployed parents/care givers. “If we can provide assistance to unemployed parents/care givers through the proposed basic income grant, this could help improve the nutritional status of children”, says Devereux. “It is an investment in the future.”
Civil Society’s rapid response averts covid-19 hunger catastrophe
The massive mobilisation of civil society organisations across the Western Cape in the first six weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown, while the government scrambled to put in place financial alternatives for food relief, averted a hunger crisis of catastrophic proportions.
Bottom-up approach to food relief, if properly instituted in a dignified, collaborative manner, is the way to go with grassroots food distribution
The statistics tell the story; in that first month and a half, the South African Social Security Agency reported, the number of people no longer getting paid anything at all spiralled from 5.2% to 15.4% – and worse was expected to come.
In the Western Cape, civil society was on the move and, in the 74 days from 25 March, they fed more than 41 000 hungry people every day, prepared more than 3 million meals, distributed nearly 80 000 food parcels, and assisted households and community kitchens with digital shopping vouchers to the value of R854 700.
There are now calls for the government to give them a place at the proverbial table, so those relationships can be harnessed beyond the crisis, and their valuable input can drive food policy to ultimately frame long-term solutions.
‘A food safety crisis now would bring SA’s medical sector to its knees’
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the authorities grapple with how to assure safe food production and delivery from an industry battered by lockdown regulations, one of South Africa’s top food safety experts has warned that the country cannot afford another food-borne outbreak like the listeriosis one of 2017.
Korsten was a panellist at the virtual World Accreditation Day Dialogue on 9 June 2020, sponsored by the South African National Accreditation System (SANAS) and Business Day. Its aim was to raise awareness of the critical role that food safety has to play in the maintenance of a healthy population – especially in countries like South Africa where diseases such as HIV have left millions of people immunocompromised, and now further complicated by COVID-19.
Prof Korsten leads the food safety research programme within the DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Food Security.