Small informal retailers are a ubiquitous feature of any developing country’s urban landscape. Known as spaza shops in South Africa, they are an important, even vital, component in the townships. Numbering over 100,000 across the nation, they make critical contributions to local food security, self-employment and community cohesion. In the last decade, the sector has undergone extensive change. A new class of traders has emerged. They have often – but not always – been foreign. For this reason, this changing character of South Africa’s spaza sector has become associated with chauvinistic and xenophobic portrayals of immigrant shopkeepers.
It is time to take a much more careful look at supermarkets which use their market and corporate power to push smaller players and SMMEs — South African and foreign-owned — out of South Africa’s township economy.
To address this lack of awareness and stimulate deliberations supporting more democratic urban food planning and governance, PLAAS and researchers in the CoE-FS’s Food Governance and Policy Reform theme undertook to develop a series of information briefs on key issues and concerns in local food governance
Learning from the evolution of state-subsidised university restaurants in Brazil, is an important consideration for universities in the global South currently dealing with how to end student hunger on campuses.
Hunger among university students ranges between 30% to 65%, costing not just the individual students, but also the institutions and the country, writes Oluwafunmilola Adeniyi.
Lockdowns threaten childrens’ nutrition: why extra care is needed
It’s not just children already born who are at risk. During the 21 days of the current lockdown, approximately 240,000 South African women will be in the third trimester of their pregnancies. This is a critical time for their well-being and the physical development of their unborn children. Any nutritional shock may have severe implications, both in the short-term birth weight of the child and in the longer term, as stunting. There are some steps that can be taken to mitigate these fallouts. They include raising child support grants and extending a grant to pregnant women. And businesses also need to come to the party by not ramping up food prices.