More SA households with children went hungry in 2024 than in 2023 — even as the country’s latest food security index showed an improvement.
The SA food security index 2025, which reflects last year’s data and was released to mark World Food Day, shows the overall score rising from 44.9 in 2023 to 56.5 in 2024. This marks a recovery from 2023 when the index fell to its lowest level in more than a decade.
The index, released by the Shoprite Group in collaboration with Stellenbosch University economists, attributes the improvement to an expansion in school feeding schemes, a modest increase in dietary diversity among households and a decline in food inflation.
But even as the upward trend appears to be “reversing the trends we saw from the [Covid-19] period and from the geopolitical tensions at the onset of the Ukraine war”, as Stellenbosch University development economist Dieter von Fintel noted, the number of households with children experiencing hunger still rose from 9% in 2023 to 11.9% in 2024. These households were “sometimes, often or always” hungry.
According to a 2024 Child Food Poverty report by Unicef, 23% of SA children live in severe food poverty, placing the country among just 20 nations that together account for 65% of all children affected worldwide.
Business Day earlier reported nearly 4,500 children younger than five years old died in SA in the past five years due to malnutrition. KwaZulu-Natal recorded the most deaths and the Western Cape the fewest.
This startling data was disclosed by health minister Aaron Motsoaledi in reply to a parliamentary question earlier this year.
Motsoaledi said that since 2020, 4,447 children under the age of five died in SA, their deaths being associated with “but not necessarily caused by moderate acute malnutrition or severe acute malnutrition”. Nearly 3,000 of the deaths reported in public hospitals in the period under review had evidence of severe acute malnutrition.
According to Sanjeev Raghubir, Shoprite Group’s chief sustainability officer, one in five people still lack diverse diets. “Price remains the driving factor in determining what families eat,” he said.
According to the report, 61.7% of South Africans in 2024 could not afford a healthy diet, which costs $3.90 (R67) per person per day. SA fared worst among peer countries such as Botswana, Namibia, Ethiopia, India, Egypt, Brazil and Indonesia — despite having similar levels of development.
All provinces except the Eastern Cape saw improvements in their index scores in 2024, albeit from a low baseline in 2023. While 80.8% of households consumed food from more than six food groups, the remaining 20% continue to face nutritional deprivation.
The Free State recorded the worst outcomes in terms of dietary diversity, with nearly half (49.3%) of the population consuming three or fewer food groups in 24 hours.
Limpopo and Gauteng achieved the highest food security index scores in 2024 and the Northern Cape and the North West the lowest.
While food poverty continues to rise among rural female-headed households, they have seen slight reductions in hunger and small improvements in dietary diversity, suggesting resilience strategies beyond income, such as subsistence farming or accessing community-based food sources.
In contrast, female-headed households in urban areas have experienced a slight increase in hunger, where limited space and resources make it difficult to produce food independently. For many low-income households, relying solely on market-based food access appears to leave them more vulnerable to food insecurity.
“We’re hopeful that [the index] improvement will be sustainable, even though the food security crisis is by no means fully solved,” said Von Fintel.
With Nompilo Goba
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