No. 13: The State of Food Insecurity in Harare, Zimbabwe

Harare is at the epicentre of the economic meltdown and political crisis that has devastated Zimbabwe over the last decade and led to a mass exodus from the country. Those who remained in Zimbabwe’s largest city and capital endured unprecedented hardship as the formal economy collapsed, unemployment soared and poverty deepened. Household surveys conducted in Harare with official sanction between 2003 and 2009 appear to demonstrate that food insecurity was not a particularly serious problem, a conclusion sharply at odds with reality. In 2008, at the height of the crisis, AFSUN therefore implemented its own baseline food security survey in Harare using a well-tested and reliable methodology. This paper presents and discusses the results of that survey and shows that Harare had become the most food insecure city in the SADC region by 2008. Levels of food insecurity were extraordinarily high as poor households struggled to find the income to purchase what little food was available in the shops and informal markets. The paper demonstrates that participation in the informal food economy was the major response to the crisis, providing poor households with a modicum of food and income. Urban agriculture for home consumption also grew in importance as a crisis response. While the political and economic situation in Zimbabwe has stabilised somewhat since 2008, the long-term impact of many years of enforced food insecurity on the city population is incalculable. This paper concludes with the recommendation that ongoing monitoring of the urban food security situation in Harare is essential in order to begin to develop national and municipal policies that could ensure a food secure future for the city

No. 02: The State of Urban Food Insecurity in Southern Africa

The number of people living in urban areas is rising rapidly in Southern Africa. By mid-century, the region is expected to be 60% urban. Rapid urbanization is leading to growing food insecurity in the region’s towns and cities. This paper presents the results of the first ever regional study of the prevalence of food insecurity in Southern Africa. The AFSUN food security household survey was conducted simultaneously in 2008-9 in 11 cities in 8 SADC countries. The results confirm high levels of food insecurity amongst the urban poor in terms of food availability, accessibility, reliability and dietary diversity. The survey provides important insights into the causes of food insecurity and the kinds of households that are most vulnerable to food insecurity. It also shows the heavy reliance of the urban poor on informal food sources and the growing importance of supermarket chains

Population change and socio-economic development in Zimbabwe

It is a commonly held theory that population is related to levels of social and economic development within a given country or society. The work of Becker in the early 1960s gave much impetus to studies of the relationship between fertility, mortality and migration, on the one hand and their determinants, on the other. The determinants were seen as the social, economic, political and cultural settings of the countries or socities under study. The thesis attempts to apply this theory in relation to the demographic development of Zimbabwe. The thesis postulates that socio-economic differentials within Zimbabwe are sufficiently pronounced as to begin to affect the demographic structure of the country. It is with this in mind that three objectives are set for the thesis: a) the exploration of the demographic structure of the population of Zimbabwe, as a means of furthering the understanding of the nature of the demographic development of the country; b) the development and utilization of data estimation techniques as a means of overcoming the deficiencies in the data collected from official sources; and, c) the investigation of the link between population change, on the one hand, with social and economic development on the other. The hypothesis proceeds through the examination of such social and economic variables as income, education, health and other social indicators in relation to fertility, migration and mortality. Due to the inadequacy of data on the demographic variables, the thesis estimates such data using the recognized relationships among the demographic variables. The estimated demographic measures are subjected to correlation and regression analysis after the development structure of the country has been explored through factor and cluster analysis. Three geographical scales are used in the analyses viz. the province, the district and the local authority area. Use of the three geographical scales exposes the dangers of extrapolating and generalizing national patterns of demographic, social and economic development to the levels of the district and the local authority, as well as exposing different features of the development profile of the country of Zimbabwe. The thesis concludes that there is a differentiation in the demographic profile of the various geographical regions of the country, based on inequitable distribution of resources in the past when the country was under white settler colonial rule. The advent of independence and the introduction of policies designed to reduce such inequalities had not had time to work by the time the 1982 Census, from whose data the study is based, was taken. The thesis therefore recommends that further censuses are required if the effect of such policies are to be measured. It further recommends the use of cross-temporal instead of the cross-sectional data which was applied in this study

No. 02: The State of Urban Food Insecurity in Southern Africa

The number of people living in urban areas is rising rapidly in Southern Africa. By mid-century, the region is expected to be 60% urban. Rapid urbanization is leading to growing food insecurity in the region’s towns and cities. This paper presents the results of the first ever regional study of the prevalence of food insecurity in Southern Africa. The AFSUN food security household survey was conducted simultaneously in 2008-9 in 11 cities in 8 SADC countries. The results confirm high levels of food insecurity amongst the urban poor in terms of food availability, accessibility, reliability and dietary diversity. The survey provides important insights into the causes of food insecurity and the kinds of households that are most vulnerable to food insecurity. It also shows the heavy reliance of the urban poor on informal food sources and the growing importance of supermarket chains