MALNUTRITION: Broken promises — how SA’s National Food and Nutrition Security Plan missed the mark

{JSON.stringify(article.attachments[0], null, 2)} --> Despite ambitions to combat hunger and malnutrition, South Africa’s National Food and Nutrition Security Plan (2018-2023) fell short of its goals. From stalled governance bodies and funding shortages to fragmented monitoring systems and provincial bottlenecks, this analysis shows where it did deliver, and where it did not.

The National Food and Nutrition Security Plan (2018-2023) was supposed to address hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition.

“The first plan was largely not implemented , no budget was made available for implementation and there was no way to assess most of the objectives as the data was not collected,” Andrew Bennie, senior researcher in climate policy and food systems at the Institute for Economic Justice, told Daily Maverick.

The first of the plan’s strategic objectives was to establish a National Food Security (FNS) Council to coordinate government and stakeholders. It was established, but never met.

The FNS did not meet due to leadership changes and transition that “coincided with the development of this structure,” the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (DPME) told Daily Maverick.

“The sub-committees were to be established once the fully-fledged FNS Council was in place. At a technical level, subcommittees were existent and functional, and provided technical monitoring and oversight of the plan in accordance with the seven objectives of the plan. They were led by sector experts from the line function departments, supported by other departments,” said the DPME.

The plan’s logic made the FNS Council and sub-committees the foundation for its other objectives.

Objective six was to monitor and evaluate how the plan was working. No unified evaluation took place, and the plan’s progress was evaluated in 2023, in the Implementation Evaluation of the National Food and Nutrition Security Plan report.

The evaluation in 2023 found that none of the five Objective 6 indicators met their 2023 target.

There was no consolidated tracking mechanism, fragmented departmental reporting, indicators that did not align with routinely collected data, weak adaptive management and most impact indicators were unable to be assessed.

The DPME told Daily Maverick that claims of a missing monitoring system were a “misnomer”, as other departments had existing systems monitoring food security and the nutritional status of South Africans. The department said impact indicators could not be reported on because a follow-up South Africa Demographic and Health Survey (SADHS) could not be conducted after 2016 due to funding barriers.

“Conducting an SADHS is a resource-intensive undertaking, and funding became a barrier. It still is.”

Asked how the lack of monitoring affected the implementation of strategic objectives, DPME said, “The so-called ‘late evaluation’ did not affect the implementation of the plan, because monitoring was happening consistently, with remedial action undertaken where necessary.”

They added that findings of the evaluation continue to inform the development of the new plan.