SynthesisPloS one2017
A systematic review of sub-national food insecurity research in South Africa: Missed opportunities for policy insights.
Synthesis in PloS one, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Policy options to transform food systems for affordable and healthy diets in South Africa: a systematic review with stakeholder prioritization.Frontiers in nutrition · 2026Pooled it
- Household food insecurity in South Africa from 1999 to 2021: a metrics perspective.Public health nutrition · 2023Pooled it
- The anti-politics of food in South Africa: transformation, accountability and the nutrition policy subsystem.Public health nutrition · 2025Article
- Patterns of Adverse Childhood Experiences from a Longitudinal South African Community Sample: A Latent Class Analysis.International journal on child maltreatment : research, policy and practice · 2025Article
- Food insecurity in women with mental illnesses attending a psychiatric hospital in KwaZulu-Natal.The South African journal of psychiatry : SAJP : the journal of the Society of Psychiatrists of South Africa · 2025Article
- Navigating the Nexus of Food Insecurity, Anxiety, and Depression in the Face of Climate Change: A Longitudinal Study in Rural Kenya.Depression and anxiety · 2025Article
- Article
- Patterns and trends in household food security in rural Mpumalanga Province, South Africa.Development Southern Africa · 2024Article
- The outlook of food security and food safety in Africa: correspondence.Annals of medicine and surgery (2012) · 2023Article
- Exploring intimate partner violence among pregnant Eswatini women seeking antenatal care: How agency and food security impact violence-related outcomes.Global public health · 2022Article
- Cognitive performance in a South African cohort of people with HIV and comorbid major depressive disorder.Journal of neurovirology · 2022Article
- Article
- Food Desert Status of Family Child Care Homes: Relationship to Young Children's Food Quality.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Socio-demographic predictors of food security among rural households in Langai district in Plateau-Nigeria: a cross-sectional study.The Pan African medical journal · 2022Article
- Caregivers' Knowledge and Food Accessibility Contributes to Childhood Malnutrition: A Case Study of Dora Nginza Hospital, South Africa.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Food Insecurity, Safety Nets, and Coping Strategies during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Multi-Country Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Evidence for factors associated with diet and physical activity in African and Caribbean countries.Bulletin of the World Health Organization · 2021Review
- Considerations for the design of nutrition-sensitive production programmes in rural South Africa.BMC public health · 2020Article
- Article
- Extended composite index of anthropometric failure in Argentinean preschool and school children.Public health nutrition · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Food insecurity is an intractable problem in South Africa. The country has a tradition of evidence-based decision making, grounded in the findings of national surveys. However, the rich insights from sub-national surveys remain a largely untapped resource for understandings of the contextual experience of food insecurity. A web-based search identified 169 sub-national food insecurity studies conducted in the post-apartheid period between 1994 and 2014. The systematic review found that the studies used 27 different measures of food insecurity, confounding the comparative analysis of food insecurity at this level. While social grants have brought a measure of poverty relief at household level, unaffordable diets were the root cause of food insecurity. The increasing consumption of cheaper, more available and preferred 'globalised' foods with high energy content and low nutritional value lead to overweight and obesity alongside child stunting. Unless a comparable set of indicators is used in such surveys, they are not able to provide comparable information on the scope and scale of the problem. Policy makers should be engaging with researchers to learn from these studies, while researchers need to share this wealth of sub-national study findings with government to strengthen food security planning, monitoring, and evaluation at all levels.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.