Liam Riley

Comparative urban food geographies in Blantyre and Gaborone

The geographical diversity of African cities creates context-specific strengths and weaknesses in household food security that come to light in the comparative case study presented in this paper. A recent survey of low-income households in 11 southern African cities found a much higher rate of food security in Blantyre (48%) relative to Gaborone (18%), which was a surprising finding considering Blantyre’s lower ‘development’ status in terms of urban infrastructure, economic opportunities and urban planning. A comparison of the relative scales at which the food production and distribution networks operate to feed each of the cities offers some insight into why Gaborone’s ‘development’ is paradoxically linked to the higher level in food insecurity among its low-income households. The majority of households in the Blantyre survey produced some of their own food and usually purchased food from informal markets; by contrast, most of the food in Gaborone is produced outside of the country and accessed through international supermarket chains. The comparison of these cities, typical of the urban extremes in southern Africa, throws into bold relief the importance of scale for theorizing urban food security in the Global South.

Food, Place, and Culture in Urban Africa: Comparative Consumption in Gaborone and Blantyre

Urban food insecurity is an increasingly important research and policy challenge in urbanizing sub-Saharan Africa. There is growing concern within food security literature about the paradoxical expansion of both hunger and obesity within African cities, and yet there is insufficient research from a social science perspective to explain the coexistence of dietary deficiency, micronutrient deficiencies, and obesity in Africa’s diverse urban contexts. Locally appropriate strategies to address the multiple health effects of under- and overnutrition are developed within unique environmental conditions and constraints, different economic systems, and different cultural milieux. These factors shape what foods are available, which ones are affordable, and how urban residents subjectively experience food security. This article analyzes the Household Dietary Diversity Scores (HDDS) from a regional survey, focusing on a qualitative comparison of Gaborone, Botswana, and Blantyre, Malawi, to draw out the embedded differences in food consumption patterns in the 2 cities, raising several implications of these differences for understanding urban food security in sub-Saharan Africa. The comparison generates insights into the limitations of quantitative metrics of food security abstracted from the local context and highlights the importance of geographical observations of environment, political economy, and culture for understanding urban food security.

Orphan geographies in Malawi

There are about one million orphans in Malawi. The global response has been a mix of alarm and inaction, with well-intended efforts often stymied by misunderstandings about childhoods, family dynamics, and poverty in Malawi. This paper uses childrens geographies and interviews with 25 orphans in Malawi to bring forward the everyday lives and circumstances of orphans at the micro-scale, while addressing the impact of macro-scale processes such as the Millennium Development Goals and transnational charities. The results point to specific problems with contemporary understandings of orphanhood in southern Africa and underscore the need for reflection on the effectiveness of interventions targeted at orphans as a discrete group.

Operation Dongosolo and the geographies of urban poverty in Malawi

Urban poverty in southern Africa is a multi-dimensional issue comprising both deeply rooted historical factors expressed in the built environments of cities and contemporary factors related to ongoing political and economic changes. The tension between states and street vendors throughout southern Africa is part of a perennial struggle for the use of urban space. For many low-income urban people, vending provides crucial resources, both in terms of household income and the distribution of basic goods through informal networks. This article focuses on the consequences for urban food security of street vendor evictions in Blantyre in 2006, under Operation Dongosolo. Dongosolo reshaped the geographies of where people could buy food and where they could earn a living. It re-established the primacy of formal-sector businesses and middle-class lifestyles, which served both contingent political purposes and long-standing expectations of what urban space should look like. I elaborate on three factors that led to Dongosolo: problems with the decentralisation process and the implementation of local democratic institutions; the formation of the Democratic Peoples Party (DPP) as the governing party and the associated shift in patronage networks; and the cultural attitude that the poor do not belong in the city. Close reading of the causal factors and consequences of Dongosolo for the urban poor demonstrates the structural nature of urban poverty in Malawi, which is embedded in local debates over the purpose of cities.

‘Gender hates men’: untangling gender and development discourses in food security fieldwork in urban Malawi

Abstract This article examines the social construction and contestation of gender and gender roles in the city of Blantyre in Malawi. In fieldwork on gendered household roles related to food security, interviews with men and women revealed a distinct set of connotations with the word gender, which reflected Malawians’ historical and contemporary engagement with concepts of development, modernity, and human rights. We denote the Malawian concept of gender as gender in order to distinguish the word participants used in interviews from the more widely accepted conventional definition. We then use this distinction to highlight the ways in which ideas of gender equality have been introduced and received in the Malawian context. The urban setting of the research is key to drawing out the association of gender with Westernization, bringing into focus the power dynamics inherent in the project of translating global discourses of gender rights and gender equality into meaningful social change in developing countries. Gender in Malawi denotes a top-down (and outside-in) process of framing Malawi’s goals for gender equality. This creates political constraints both in the form of resistance to gender, because it resonates with a long history of social change imposed by outside forces, and in the form of superficial adherence to gender to appear more urban and modern, especially to a Western researcher. Local understandings of gender as gender undermine efforts to promote gender equality as a means to address Malawi’s intense urban poverty and household food insecurity.

Rethinking the Orphan Crisis: Community-Based Responses to Orphan Care in Malawi

Within the past two decades, sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has experienced an unprecedented rise in the orphan population. An estimated 14 million orphans alone have lost parents to AIDS (UNICEF, 2009). With 81 percent of the world’s AIDS orphans living in SSA, the phenomenon of African AIDS orphanhood has attracted considerable global attention in recent years. Paradoxically, however, despite growing international concern (UNICEF, 2003; 2006), there has been surprisingly little research on national policies related to African orphan children and on the everyday lives of these children. Narratives of the “African orphan crisis,” usually found in journalistic and donor agency reports, often rest on latent Northern assumptions about the nature of childhood, family, and community, and on the premise that the death of biological parents almost inevitably results in children’s helplessness and abandonment. Although appeals to “save” orphans tend to accentuate what are generally assumed to be their impoverished and isolated circumstances, too little thought is paid to the possibilities of support networks at local levels (Bray, 2003; Meintjes & Giese, 2006). Such crisis narratives are unfortunate, for not only is orphanhood in SSA diverse and complex, but as well there is growing evidence that young orphans and the communities in which they reside often possess resources that foster resilience and facilitate adaptation to difficult circumstances (Abebe & Aase, 2007; Ennew, 2005; Meintjes & Giese, 2006; Panter-Brick, 2000).

Urban household food security in China and Mozambique: a gender-based comparative approach

ABSTRACT International comparison of development indicators is a perennial challenge in global development studies. The challenge is especially difficult when measuring urban household food security using experience-based metrics that are influenced by countless contextual factors. This article presents a gender-based analysis of household food security surveys conducted in Nanjing, China and Maputo, Mozambique. The analysis demonstrates the value of a gender lens for understanding the intersecting household characteristics associated with urban food insecurity. While Maputo had much higher food insecurity overall, our analysis leads to nuanced insights into shared and divergent connections between gender inequality and food insecurity in both cities.

Gender, Mobility and Food Security

Access to food, rather than a shortage of food availability, is the central problem for urban household food security. Blantyre in Malawi presents a useful case study for demonstrating the importance of linking gender and urban food security. Rates of urban food insecurity are less severe than in other cities surveyed by AFSUN. Yet female-centred households were twice as likely to be severely food insecure as nuclear households. This paper offers some explanations for the survey findings by drawing on qualitative research to understand the gendered geographies of food access in Blantyre. The first point is that gender shapes mobility, which in turn shapes a household’s ability to increase its food security by procuring food from the most affordable sources, particularly peri-urban markets. The second point is that gender shapes a household’s ability to produce its own food, a popular livelihood strategy in Blantyre that often mitigates the effects of low incomes on household food security. The third point is that gender influences a person’s potential income, which shapes the household’s economic access to food. These three points demonstrate the multi-dimensional relationship between gender and urban food security.

Intersectional identities: Food, space and gender in urban Malawi

abstract This briefing provides a feminist interpretation of food consumption in Blantyre, Malawi, drawing primarily from participatory group discussions with a variety of residents. In these discussions participants were asked to name foods and then categorise them as rural, urban or both rural and urban, and then as for men, women or children. The result is an extensive list of foods categorised in a way that provides insight into the signification of these foods in constructing and expressing Malawian urban identities in intersecting socio-spatial, gendered, and generational terms. We link the findings to wider discussions about the ‘nutritional transition’ taking place in urban Africa and show that the food categories that support this linear model of social change – traditional/modern, rural/urban, natural/processed, local/global – do not reflect the reality of hybridised food cultures in Blantyre. Changing diets are far more nuanced and complex than the dietary transition thesis suggests, being intricately bound up with identities and culture, as well as personal preference, economic necessity, and ecological capacity. Whereas economic factors play a central role in conditioning food choice, our focus on urban residents’ perceptions of different foods sheds light on the socio-cultural factors that shape urban food systems. This is an important contribution to debates on how to promote sustainable food security in Africa’s urbanising communities.