Abstract
Informal settlements in rapidly-growing African cities are urban and peri-urban spaces with high rates of formal unemployment, poverty, poor health outcomes, limited service provision, and chronic food insecurity. Traditional concepts of food deserts developed to describe North American and European cities do not accurately capture the realities of food inaccessibility in Africa’s urban informal food deserts. This paper focuses on a case study of informal settlements in the Namibian capital, Windhoek, to shed further light on the relationship between informality and food deserts in African cities. The data for the paper was collected in a 2016 survey and uses a sub-sample of households living in shack housing in three informal settlements in the city. Using various standard measures, the paper reveals that the informal settlements are spaces of extremely high food insecurity. They are not, however, food deprived. The proximity of supermarkets and open markets, and a vibrant informal food sector, all make food available. The problem is one of accessibility. Households are unable to access food in sufficient quantity, quality, variety, and with sufficient regularity.
Highlights
With the rapid growth of Africa’s urban population, has come an explosion of informal settlements on the fringes of most cities, what Doug Saunders optimistically refers to as “transitional spaces” or “arrival cities” and UN Habitat more pessimistically designates as “slums” [1,2]
The country of Namibia, which was controlled by South Africa until independence in 1991 and had a similar history of draconian controls on urbanization, has 39% of its urban population residing in informal settlements [6,7]
We use an expanded definition of food deserts which links them to the definition of food security above, and defines them as poor, often informal, neighborhoods characterized by high food insecurity and lows dietary diversity, with multiple market and non-market food sources but limited household access to food [45]
Summary
With the rapid growth of Africa’s urban population, has come an explosion of informal settlements on the fringes of most cities, what Doug Saunders optimistically refers to as “transitional spaces” or “arrival cities” and UN Habitat more pessimistically designates as “slums” [1,2]. Informal settlements in African cities are urban and peri-urban spaces with high rates of formal unemployment, grinding poverty, heavy reliance on the informal economy, poor health outcomes, very limited basic services provision, and heightened vulnerability to climate change [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15] They are generally areas with high levels of individual, household, and community food insecurity [16,17,18,19]. We use an expanded definition of food deserts which links them to the definition of food security above, and defines them as poor, often informal, neighborhoods characterized by high food insecurity and lows dietary diversity, with multiple market and non-market food sources but limited household access to food [45]. The final section addresses the role of the informal food sector in the informal settlements, arguing that it improves accessibility to more nutritious foods, households remain mired in the city’s food deserts
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