Msunduzi

Food Security Status in the area

The Msunduzi Municipality is the provincial capital of the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal. It has over 600000 people. Attracting more worksheets, the population of Msunduzi is primarily young, with around half of the residents under 30 years of age and nearly 40% under 20 years of age. With high HIV/AIDS in the province, Msunduzi was one of the first municipalities in South Africa to develop an HIV/AIDS strategy well before the national and provincial strategies were rolled out which saw its elderly and youth adopt quickly. While child headed households are low, the number of children being born has also decreased in the area. With larger families being more inclusive of extended families, the number of female headed homes has increased to make up about 53% of the population. It cannot be assumed that the Msunduzi community is without its sense of ubuntu. 

With the population profile is dominated by unskilled and semi-skilled, the main sources of income are social-grants, wage employment and part-time work.  With an increasing number of people living in formal houses, the reportedly slow pace of formal housing delivery has caused frustration in the poorer areas. This has resulted in new informal structures “mushrooming” as a result.  

Msunduzi is a city in which there is plenty of food but where the majority of the urban poor regularly go hungry. The mean HFIAS score for the Msunduzi households was 11.3 (with a median of 11), which indicates high overall levels of food insecurity. 60% of households in poor Msunduzi neighbourhoods are severely food insecure and another 27% are moderately food secure. Only 7% could be considered food secure. The majority of poor urban households in Msunduzi do not source any food from urban agriculture, rural–urban transfers or inter-household transfers. Almost all households buy the vast majority of the food they consume, a pattern observed in both of the other South African cities and, indeed, throughout the region as a whole. The informal food system in Msunduzi appears to be significantly smaller than in many other cities in the region. This could be because of intense competition from supermarkets. Only 42% of surveyed households reported

that they normally obtain food through informal channels, compared to 72% for the region as a whole. Dietary diversity was also extremely low. Food insecurity is clearly related to levels of income even in poor communities (with 78% of those in the lowest income band and 44% of those in the upper band experiencing severe food insecurity). Household size did not make a great deal of difference to levels of insecurity but female-centred households are more food insecure than male-centred households (64% versus 56% severely food insecure).

There is no data on Msunduzi’s IPC Acute Food Insecurity  Analysis available. For this reason, data for eThekwini Municipality, which it falls under,  will be used.