South Africa’s policies for child nutritional security are similar to those of Brazil and Peru. Those countries have seen improvements in the rate of stunting. Not so in South Africa, where around 25% of children under the age of three years are stunted. The situation has not changed in two decades.
In South Africa, some 89.4% of households have access to piped or tap water in their dwellings. Nevertheless diarrhoeal diseases, often associated with poor water and sanitation, remain the second leading cause of death in children under five years of age in the country.
AuthorJulian May
Julian May is the Director of the NRF-DST Centre of Excellence in Food Security at the University of the Western Cape. He has worked on options for poverty reduction including land reform, social grants, information technology and urban agriculture in Africa and in the Indian Ocean Islands. He has also worked on the development and use of systems for monitoring the impact of policy using official statistics, impact assessment and action research. His current research focuses on food security, childhood deprivation and malnutrition. He has been an associate researcher at Oxford University, the University of Manchester and the International Food Policy Research Institute. He currently serves on the South African Statistics Council, is a Member of the Academy of Science in South Africa, is the President of the South African Development Studies Association and is a Research Fellow in the Comparative Research Programme of Poverty at the University of Bergen. He has edited 6 books and published over 60 papers in books and academic journals.