High food prices put slum residents at risk of starving

To get to Sophie Adhiambo’s house in Korogocho in Nairobi, you have to jump over bubbling sewerage and pools of black water, demarcating the tin-roofed homesteads. Inside her one-roomed house, three children aged four, two-and-a-half, and one, do not stir as visitors fill up their cramped space.

 Caesar, the second-born, pulls up his trousers which are folded at the waist to keep them from falling, as he moves closer to Akinyi, their 16-year-old aunt who watches them when their mother goes to work. On Akinyi’s laps is one-year-old Susan. Unlike children her age, she can neither stand nor walk, and when tickled, instead of giggling, Susan stares blankly.

This, Carol Wandia, a nutritionist at the Korogocho Health Centre, explains, is typical of malnutrition. Malnutrition refers to deficiencies, excesses or imbalances in a person’s intake of energy and nutrients. It covers both overweight and obesity, as well as undernutrition which includes stunting (low weight for age), wasting (low weight for height), underweight (low weight for age) and micronutrient deficiencies or insufficiencies (lack of important vitamins and minerals).  Ms Akinyi’s nephews and niece are part of larger grim statistics of malnutrition in urban slums.

The so-called urban food deserts, are characterised by high food insecurity and low dietary diversity leading to compromised diets and undernutrition. Such malnutrition impairs growth and mental development, and places children at increased risk of illness and death. There are at least 17,000 children under age five who are at risk of malnutrition in informal settlements in Nairobi.

When Akinyi’s aunt, Ms Adhiambo, gets back from seeking laundry and cleaning jobs, she comes home with Sh200, if lucky, which she uses to buy sukuma wiki and a small packet of maize flour for dinner, the family’s only meal. Once in a while, they have tea and bread. On some days, Ms Adhiambo comes back empty-handed, which means sleeping hungry. With rising prices that have pushed food even further out of reach, the situation is even direr. Ms Adhiambo is never sure if she will find something they can afford to eat.

MARGINALISED GROUPS

On good days, they buy mnyonyo or anyone, which are leftovers like bread and butter discarded by airlines and collected from the Dandora dumpsite by scavengers who then sell them to families like Ms Adhiambo’s. Such food comes with the risk of infections and diarrhoea, and lacks the necessary nutrients found in a balanced diet.

In some places desperate families cook and share food supplements and porridge distributed by non-governmental agencies to save children from malnutrition. At the Korogocho Health Centre where Ms Wandia works, they attend to at least 15 malnourished children, about three of whom are severely malnourished, daily.

Nevertheless, food security  in informal settlements is rarely addressed by official policy. Andrew Osiany, an advocacy advisor at Oxfam, is part of a team of humanitarian agencies conducting a survey on malnutrition due to food scarcity in Kibera, Mukuru and Korogocho,  in Nairobi, a city where two million people live in slums. Residents rely on erratic, low-wage casual labour  to survive.

 “In times of food scarcity and  high food prices, their ability to provide food for their families is overstretched and they resort to other means of survival different from those used in rural areas, “Mr Osiany explains.

This section of the population is often left out of food security interventions, which focus on arid and semi-arid areas, with little or no support for families in urban slums.

Children are the hardest hit with a report by Save the Children released on International Children’s Day on June 1 showing that the number of stunted children in the world increased from 24 million to 26 million in 2016.

Despite the proportion of stunted children in East and Southern Africa having declined from 53 per cent in 1990 to 35 per cent in 2016, the 2016 Global Nutrition Report shows that malnutrition is now the “new normal” across the world and is responsible for nearly half of all deaths of children under age five.

The report further highlights the staggering economic costs of malnutrition, which accounts for an annual 11 per cent loss of gross domestic product (GDP), in Africa and Asia.