Three decades of fighting against hunger in Africa: Progress, challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Tackling hunger is a challenge for many African governments because of its endemic nature on the continent. Many African countries have found it difficult to achieve significant reductions in hunger and malnutrition since 1990. In this paper, we review the progress of African countries in the fight against hunger over the past three decades, using the Global Hunger Index (GHI) scores. Ghana had the best GHI improvement (-53.1%) while Zimbabwe and Central African Republic had slightly increased GHI scores (+1.6%). Within this time period, few countries had significant reductions in their GHI scores, while some suffered increases. Furthermore, in assessing the three indicators of GHI: (i) prevalence of undernourishment (percent population), (ii) prevalence of stunting in children (%) and (iii) prevalence of wasting in children (%), we found that no country in Africa was able to achieve all three targets. Six countries (Tunisia, Ghana, South Africa, Morocco, Mauritius and Algeria) were able to achieve targets for two of these while the majority achieved only one. We present country-level evidence of clear links between GHI scores with score for human development, social protection and terrorism. Some challenges that made the zero hunger target a difficult task in Africa are reviewed while opportunities for moving the continent towards the zero-hunger target by 2030 are also explored.