A growing number of Kenyans are going hungry as Covid takes its toll

What you need to know:

• Over half of households (51 per cent) say that they strain to get enough food to eat daily with their consumption having declined in the past few months, a new survey has revealed.
• Two in three  families could not go more than a day without needing to get food if there was another lockdown. 
• Today, more Kenyans are food insecure and undernourished than over a decade ago, reveals a Newsplex review of food security data.

The proportion of families struggling to put adequate food on the table is at an all-time high amid the Covid-19 crisis. 

Over half of households (51 per cent) say that they strain to get enough food to eat daily with their consumption having declined in the past few months, a new survey has revealed. 

The share of families that could not go more than a day without needing to get more food if there was another lockdown doubled to 60 per cent in the fourth quarter of last year from about a third (31 per cent) in the second quarter, according to the survey by Twaweza East Africa, a research organisation.  About a fifth of the food-insecure families say they have no food available at home at all.

Those living in Nairobi and Mombasa, the less educated and casual workers were most likely to report that they did not have enough to eat or any food stored, according to the mobile phone survey done from 18 November to 3 December.

Behind the stark numbers are real Kenyans like Mary Waceke,58, who lost her thriving poultry business during the first government partial pandemic lockdown. Having lost her 38-year-old son on Christmas day in 2019, Ms Waceke was still in mourning at the start of 2020, but she found solace in other aspects of her life, like her poultry business that earned her about Sh70,000 a month.

The business enabled her to comfortably provide for her five other children until the government announced a lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. “When President Uhuru Kenyatta ordered a partial lockdown, all the hotels that I supplied with chicken and the road hawkers who were my customers closed shop” she recalls. “I had to pay rent, buy chicken feeds and feed my family. I made a lot of losses until it reached a point where it was very difficult to feed my family,” she adds.

Besides her poultry business, Ms Waceke, who is HIV positive, also leased a farm where she grew vegetables and fruits, but the owner of the land threw her out late last year.

“She wanted her piece of land back and so my poultry house and some of the vegetables I had planted in the farm were gone just like that. I did not even get time to salvage anything,” she says.

Since she was HIV positive and was on anti-retroviral drugs, lack of proper nutrition took a great toll on her.

Things got worse for her when Kenya was hit by a stockout of Septrin last year, a vital drug that is taken daily by HIV patients to fight against opportunistic infections. There is still a shortage of the drugs at the clinic where she gets her medication.

Through a support group for women living with HIV, in Kiembeni, Mombasa, Ms Waceke has been getting food and medication aid from local leaders and well-wishers. After depleting her savings, Ms Waceke moved from her rental house in Kiembeni estate to Kashani Florida village in Kisauni constituency.

Mary Waceke outside her poultry house. Image by Brian Osweta | Nation Media Group

“It reached a point where I could not pay Sh15,000 rent. A friend of mine showed me a place in Kashani where I came to an agreement with the owner of the land, that I would put up an iron sheet structure and pay in instalments,’’ she explains.

Since the beginning of the year, her women’s group has not received any donations, worsening her situation. 

With a 35-year old mentally unstable son to take care of, she now depends on her three daughters aged between 20 and 25, who do online jobs to help feed her family, as she looks for other means to bring food to the table.

Too many families, just like Waceke’s, are also struggling to meet their basic needs.

Of households in need of prescription medicine, a fifth are running very low on stocks, and a further third have no more than a week’s worth of supplies, according to the Twaweza survey.

Respondents say Covid-19 restrictions have dealt negative impacts on families. Over half (56 per cent) report that their economic situation has got worse and over a third (35 per cent) say they lost jobs or business opportunities.

One in five families blame increased prices of food and other necessities for their plight.

Food insecurity was already a major problem in Kenya even before the pandemic with the country’s general food security situation on a steady decline for over a decade.

Today, more Kenyans are food insecure and undernourished than over a decade ago, reveals a Newsplex review of food security data. The number of hungry (undernourished) Kenyans is growing, reaching about 12 million in 2017, or one in every four people. The figure was a 12 percentage-point increase from more than 10 million a decade earlier, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Stunting record

In 2017, one in four (26 percent) children under five in Kenya were stunted (too short for their age) an improvement from a third (35 percent) in 2012 but still placing the country’s stunting record the 40th worst out of 77 countries for which data was available.

Kenyans say education, health and the informal sector are the most badly affected by the economic effects of Covid-19, shows the Twaweza survey. Two in three Kenyans reported that education was the most negatively affected by impacts of Covid-19. 

Source: Daily Nation