DR. SHEETAL BHOOLA
Children at schools in KwaZulu-Natal reportedly went hungry because the assigned supplier failed to deliver meals to the designated schools as per the contract. Provincial experts described this as a mishap, and said the tender was inappropriately awarded and mishandled. It was then revealed that the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education had awarded the entire province’s school feeding scheme to a single supplier, which many believe is the reason for meals not being delivered on some days. Children from predominantly impoverished and food-insecure households went without adequate nutrition for days.
These feeding scheme initiatives aim to combat the prevalence of child hunger and nutrition in South Africa. There are about nine million children who benefit from this grant nationally. According to researchers, KwaZulu-Natal and the Northern Cape have the highest number of food-insecure households. Child hunger is a major cause of malnutrition diseases, including stunting, wasting and double-burden malnutrition.
The South African Child Gauge of 2020, published by the Children's Institute in association with the University of Cape Town, noted that South Africa is under pressure to meet the United Nations’ Global Nutrition targets by 2025. The second of the Sustainable Developmental Goals is to end all types of malnutrition globally by the year 2030. A worldwide agreement seeks to minimise stunting and wasting in children under the age of five, and to address the nutritional needs of adolescent girls, pregnant and lactating women and older persons by 2025.
In the quest to adhere to these global targets, there is a need for relevant policies and programmes. The SA Policy on Food and Nutrition Security, gazetted in 2014, has not been updated. As a result, it cannot guide programmes and procedures within the new socio-economic context. The present socio-economic landscape of South Africa has been impacted by the floods in KwaZulu-Natal, the July 2021 riots, and the global pandemic. These three events severely increased the number of food-insecure households. Food insecure households are usually overcrowded, and food is scarce. In some instances, adults skip meals so that their children can eat, and then too, these meals are not necessarily balanced. One of the aims of the school feeding scheme initiative was to ensure children receive a well-balanced nutritional meal daily. However, media reports have alerted us that not all children received nutritious balanced meals daily. Instead, these initiatives have been fraught with corruption, theft and misappropriation of funds due to the lack of a systematic evaluation or monitoring structure that can ensure their effectiveness.
The purpose of any policy is to guide strategic interventions to enhance the development of a society or nation. The SA Food and Nutrition Policy of 2014 mandates numerous strategies to increase spending on food security programmes, increase food production and distribution, and support the agricultural sector. Community-based food production initiatives and the strategic development of trade measures that can promote food security is mandated in the policy. The document instructs multi-sectoral industries that must be aligned with the above strategies and challenges.
However, the policy does not focus on South Africa’s hungry and malnourished children. There are no specific objectives that prioritise their nutritional needs, yet this is a significant national concern. The malnourishment of children is only broadly discussed in the document and incorporated into a segment that pays attention to household nutrition.
More seriously, the policy lacks a systematic approach to assist food-insecure South Africans in emergencies such as the July 2021 riots. Yet these are not the first violent protests South Africans have experienced. There is no framework for food security during a national health pandemic either. The value of these structural frameworks, which have been legitimised as policies, lies in their capacity to be relevant, contextually appropriate and timeous. The primary food and nutrition strategies have to be aligned with the global sustainable development goals, and this needs to be supported by our national policy.
If policies are intended to provide an overarching framework for systematic developmental strategies, why are they not updated, amended and contextualized appropriately? Failure to do so allows people to deviate from the national strategic process of implementation and develop frameworks that may differ from the national strategy. Should we not pay attention to policy creation and the processes that emerge from it? In addition, the policy has nationally-mandated evaluation processes at all intersections of all food and nutrition initiatives.
For development to be effective, we need to refer to a relevant policy that can guide a practical course of action, followed by transparent, systematic evaluation and assessment processes, so that we can accurately measure the successes or failures of these interventions. As citizens, we have a right to know about this challenge entirely. Our president has stipulated that good nutrition is deemed an impediment to development in South Africa.
*Bhoola has a PhD and two Master’s degrees in the social sciences. She is a lecturer, researcher and a freelance writer. Bhoola has been the recipient of awards and academic scholarships throughout her career. Visit www.sheetalbhoola.com