Southern Africa

In Africa south of the Sahara, the share of the population facing food insecurity is more than double that of any other region in the world, according to IFPRI’s 2023 Global Food Policy Report: Rethinking Food Crises Responses. Approximately 282 million people in Africa south of the Sahara, or around 20 percent of the population, were undernourished and food-insecure in 2021.

An innovative market system development (MSD) intervention in Mozambique has helped increase use of agricultural inputs and access to critical market information among smallholder farmers, according to a new policy brief released by IFPRI. These results extended beyond the direct beneficiaries as well, highlighting the potential for such interventions to provide wide-ranging benefits.  

Food insecurity is endemic in Malawi, affecting up to 38% of the population every year in the run-up to the harvest in April. Although geographically distant, there are multiple channels through which Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can make matters worse this year.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have wide-ranging impacts on living standards, poverty, food insecurity, and economic stability across the globe. For low-income regions like Africa south of the Sahara (SSA), these impacts are particularly devastating. Many countries in SSA struggled with food insecurity before the outbreak of COVID-19, and the pandemic has only exacerbated those challenges by disrupting domestic food value chains, reducing remittances and other income, and lowering populations’ purchasing power and food access.

Alarming levels of hunger and food insecurity are on the rise across the globe. According to the September 2021 mid-year update to the 2021 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC), an estimated 161 million people in 42 countries/territories have faced Crisis-level (IPC/CH Phase 3) food insecurity or higher. This number is up from the estimated 155 million acutely food-insecure people reported by the GRFC for 2020.