Southern Africa

The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the extreme inequality in Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries and pushed millions into poverty, reveals a new analysis from Oxfam, Norwegian Church Aid (NCA) and Development Finance International (DFI).

The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the extreme inequality in Southern African Development Community countries, and pushed millions into poverty. Recovering from the pandemic, however, offers SADC governments a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do reduce inequality drastically and eliminate extreme poverty by 2030. 

Oxfam and its humanitarian partner organizations are providing humanitarian support including cash, food, clean water and sanitation to people recovering from multiple cyclones that have torn across Southern Africa in the past two weeks.

Hunger is escalating as the United Nation’s humanitarian response in Mozambique is less than half funded.

In most of sub-Saharan Africa, maize is a staple food crop. This paper explores some of the reasons why maize markets fail and argues that a major reason is because there is so little trust or cooperation between governments and private traders.

Aid donors and southern African governments must take immediate and substantial action to help poor people cope with a rapidly-deteriorating regional food crisis, fuelled by El Nino-related drought and crop failures.

At least ten million poor people face hunger this year and next due to droughts and erratic rains, influenced by climate change and the likely development of a ‘super El Niño’.