Country Projects: South Africa

Overview

Like most countries, South Africa is capable of providing enough food for its people; yet more than 19 million people—40 percent of the country’s population—are food insecure. In this nation, hunger is not a matter of supply; it is a problem of access and distribution.

In late 2008, a small-scale national food recovery and distribution program known as Feedback Food Redistribution was reorganized to become the national office for a developing South African food bank network. This newly defined organization changed its name to FoodBank South Africa and divested itself of the Feedback operations in the four cities where it was operating: Cape Town, Durban, Pietermaritzburg and Johannesburg. In each of these cities, the Feedback operations merged with other local feeding organizations to create local food banks.

With support from the national government and leading companies in the food and grocery industry, FoodBank South Africa is working to establish a nationwide network of community food banks in both urban and rural areas across the country. The goal is to create 20 food banks by the end of 2011.

GFN’s Involvement

GFN got involved in the project in March 2007, spending six months conducting a feasibility assessment and identifying potential partners in the national government, private sector, and nonprofit arena. We then created an infrastructure that provides for joint planning at the national and community level, with local leadership for individual food banks in four target communities: Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban, and Port Elizabeth.

This infrastructure includes a National Forum comprised of representatives from NGOs, the national government and the business community. Each of the four communities had a Community Forum designed with similar local participation. We also helped create a Village Food Bank model that could be rolled out in rural communities.

We secured funding to underwrite the costs of the project. We also provided significant staff resources, including two temporary GFN staff members for six months in South Africa, plus two full-time supply chain experts from Accenture (one from the United States and one from the Untied Kingdom) for six months. 

Project management is now in the hands of South African representatives, and we serve as subject matter experts and project ambassadors, helping to secure buy-in and commitments from key partners in the government, private sector and nonprofit arena.

Progress

Food banks have been launched in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg, and six more are scheduled to open soon.

News

  • FoodBank Port Elizabeth launched operations on September 21st
  • FoodBank Cape Town continues to expand the highly successful Lunch Buddies program

Learn more about FoodBank South Africa.