The COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on most sections of society in South Africa, as well as across the globe, but none have been as severely affected as the poor and vulnerable who have borne the brunt of deepening poverty and hardship.
The socio-economic challenges created by lockdown restrictions including job losses, escalating food prices and disruptions to healthcare services and education will likely be greater and longer-lasting among the poor.
In South Africa, the pandemic has also exacerbated the scourge of food insecurity, with more than 2.3 million households currently experiencing child hunger. This has most acutely affected child-headed households, whose members generally fall into the category of most impoverished and vulnerable people in society.
Alleviating child hunger has been a cause long championed by the Tiger Brands Foundation through its extensive in-school breakfast programme and the initiative has focused much of its efforts on ensuring that child-headed households receive the necessary support.
The Tiger Brand Foundation operations manager Karl Muller explains that child-headed families are often overlooked in the general discourse about hunger and poverty, as they make up a relatively small percentage of all households in South Africa. Yet, they comprise some of the most marginalised and vulnerable members of society that are forced to survive with little or no source of income.
“Child-headed households often depend on financial assistance from relatives to survive, as children from household mainly fall outside the eligible age threshold for child support grants. However, the financial assistance from family members that these children rely on has also taken a knock during the pandemic,” says Muller.
Child-headed households are commonly defined as households where all members are under the age of 18 years.
A study by Children Count, a data and advocacy project of the Children’s Institute at the University of Cape Town, revealed that there were about 55 000 children living in a total of 33 000 child-only households across South Africa in 2018, which equates to 0.3% of all children in the country.
“Children living in child-only households are rare in comparison to those residing in other household forms, but the number of children living in these extreme conditions is still of major concern. The Tiger Brands Foundation has been working tirelessly to ensure that child-headed households don’t go hungry during the national lockdown through its in-school breakfast programme,” says Muller.
The Foundation provides nutritious meals to learners to 105 schools in all nine provinces throughout South Africa, providing meals to 79 593 needy leaners per day – many of whom rely on the programme for their only nutritious meal of the day.
Muller points out that the Tiger Brands Foundation also stepped up its efforts during the various school closures during lockdown to ensure that food is being delivered to their vulnerable learners’ homes to continue fighting hunger and malnutrition.
“We have prioritised the needs of impoverished families when school attendance was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, including child-headed households, by delivering nutritious food hampers to those whose children were already on our in-school breakfast programme,” he says.
“We are putting in a concerted effort to ensure that our in-school nutrition programme assists child-headed households. This is especially the case during a time when there is an increased responsibility to look after these children as they were forced to leave school amid the COVID-19 crisis.”
Children experiencing chronic undernutrition are more likely to be stunted, which can have profound implications for their ability to cope in school and engage in meaningful employment across the life course.
“This is a very critical time for our country, as well as our learners. Most of our learners come from food-insecure families and we have had to rapidly respond to the crisis in order to safeguard the gains that have been made in the nutritional and academic aspect of our beneficiaries’ lives,” adds Muller.
The food hampers that the Tiger Brands Foundation has been distributing to families across the country include far more than the usual in-school breakfast. They contain enough food to feed a family, including flour, pilchards, rice, beans, Morvite, oats, samp, mealie meal and milk powder. They also include soap to help with family hygiene, which is key to curbing the spread of the Covid-19 virus.
