Agency in South Africa’s Food Systems: Community Driven Research

The COVID-19 pandemic and its control measures have had a devastating impact on household food security in South Africa. The pandemic brought existing food injustice patterns such as spatial inequality, intersectionality, and uneven power relations to the forefront resulting in the normalisation of food insecurity. It also created a new movement of charity and fostered new alliances for solidarity.

The project consortium conducting this study consisted of a team of five SLE study programme participants, co-researching community members from research sites, and supporting civil society members and researchers from Cape Town and Berlin. This project is grounded in the concept of co-research, which is a more radical and inclusive way of doing participatory action research and relied on the cooperation of local community members who joined, shaped, and drove the process. This approach allowed a broad understanding of the sensitive and intimate topic of food insecurity by involving co-researchers in contextualisation and triangulation and by adding their voices and lived experiences to the findings.