WINDHOEK, NAMIBIA
Windhoek, situated in the highlands of Central Namibia, is characterised by its natural beauty and cultural diversity. The city is home to several significant landmarks, including the Heroes’ Acre War memorial and the Independence Memorial Museum, housed in a hilltop building in the city centre, showcasing the city's historical heritage. Windhoek boasts both modern and historic urban landscapes that are visible in the central, southern, and eastern areas. The city serves as a significant economic and tourism hub in Namibia, with a population of 494,605. However, it also faces socio-economic challenges, such as inequality and the proliferation of informal settlements.
Windhoek's food system is vibrant, despite the rapid expansion of supermarkets in the city over the past few decades. Local and informal food sources remain prevalent, and rural-to-urban food transfers and food retailers continue to play a role in the city's urban food system. However, rising inequality poses a challenge to Windhoek municipalities in terms of reducing the spread of food insecurity among city residents.
RESEARCH on WINDHOEK
HCP REPORTS
PAPERS
Opening Access to Urban Food Security Data in Africa from the Hungry Cities Partnership
The Hungry Cities Partnership (HCP) initiated a 7-year programme of food system research in eight cities of the Global South in January 2015: Mexico City, Mexico; Kingston, Jamaica; Windhoek, Namibia; Cape Town, South Africa; Maputo, Mozambique; Nairobi, Kenya; Bangalore, India; and Nanjing, China. This paper describes the research process in the four African cities of Cape Town, Maputo, Nairobi, and Windhoek. The HCP data provide rich and context-specific information useful in avoiding generalizations in theory and inserting a Southern and ...
Wild Foods, the Nutrition Transition and Urban Food Security in Northern Namibia
Rapid urbanization and food system transformation in Africa have been accompanied by growing food insecurity, reduced dietary diversity and an epidemic of non-communicable disease. While the contribution of wild and indigenous foods (WIF) to the quality of rural household diets has been of longstanding attention, research on their consumption and role amongst urban households is much more recent. This paper focuses on the consumption of WIF in three towns in northern Namibia with close ties to the surrounding rural agricultural ...
Food Clusters, Food Security and the Urban Food System of Northern Namibia
A central feature of the transformation of urban food systems in cities of the Global South is the growing presence of supermarkets and their supply chains, often termed supermarketization or a supermarket revolution. A key issue in the African context is whether supermarkets are a threat to other sources of food including informal sector vendors. Most research on the supermarket revolution and competition with other food retailers focuses on large urban conurbations with little attention paid to the role of ...
Urban Food System Governance and Food Security in Namibia
Namibia’s transition to an urban society is occurring extremely rapidly and with it has come a transformation of urban food systems, changes in diets and food consumption patterns, increased undernutrition and overnutrition, and the rapid growth of non-communicable diseases. This paper examines the policy response of the Namibian government to the nutrition transition and double burden of malnutrition with particular reference to urban centres and populations. The national government assumes responsibility for all food security and health-related programming, while local ...
Validation of the HCP Survey Tool for Measuring Urban Food Insecurity: An Item Response Theory Approach
There is some controversy on the applicability of the summand-based Household Food Security Assessment Score (HFIAS) and Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS) as measures of food insecurity in urban areas in the Global South. These measures were primarily designed for measurement in rural communities where food insecurity itself was first identified and is still predominantly conceptualized. The objective of the research reported in this paper is to assess the internal and external validity of the HFIAS and the HDDS in ...
Containing the Informal Food Sector in Windhoek, Namibia
Policy responses to the growth of the informal food sector in African cities vary from benign neglect to active destruction. The eradication of street food vending is the dominant mode of governance. Alternative approaches that recognize the inevitability of informality and the role of the sector in making food accessible to the urban poor have begun to emerge. One is an enclose-and-contain model, which creates spaces for trading and seeks to confine trading to these spaces through active policing outside ...
Governing the Informal Food Sector in Cities of the Global South
The role of the informal food sector in the urban food system cannot be appreciated or understood without the compilation and analysis of systematic and representative data on the activities of informal enterprises across a city and along food supply chains outside it. At present, there are significant gaps in the knowledge base about the character, operation, and roles of the informal food sector; a pre-requisite for sound and supportive governance. This paper presents evidence on the relative importance of ...
Supermarkets and Informal Food Vendors in Windhoek, Namibia
Much of the literature on urban food systems has focused on the expansion of supermarkets and their ability to reach urban consumers. However, the current pace of urbanization and rising urban poverty have been accompanied by a major upsurge in informality and a growing role for the informal food sector. One of the persistent arguments in the literature on supermarkets is that the expansion of modern retail undermines the informal food sector. Critics of this argument suggest that there are ...
Urban Informal Food Deserts in Windhoek, Namibia
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 ...
Revisiting Africa’s Supermarket Revolution
Africa is urbanizing at an unprecedented rate and food systems are undergoing rapid transformation. This transformation is being driven in part by a global supermarket revolution. However, the idea of an inexorable supermarket revolution on the continent has recently been contested. This paper examines the role of supermarkets in Namibia’s capital city Windhoek to test the applicability of the model. The paper is based on (a) a review of the literature on South African supermarket expansion; (b) a survey of ...
Hungry Cities of the Global South
The recent inclusion of an urban Sustainable Development Goal in the Post-2015 UN Development Agenda represents an important acknowledgement of the reality of global urbanization and the many social, economic, infrastructural and political challenges posed by the human transition to a predomi- nantly urban world. However, while the SDG provides goals for housing, transportation, land use, cultural heritage and disaster risk prevention, food is not mentioned at all. This discussion paper aims to correct this unfortunate omission by reviewing the ...
POLICY BRIEFS
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BOOK CHAPTER
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THESES
Food Deserts and Household Food Insecurity in the Informal Settlements of Windhoek, Namibia
- PhD Thesis - Rapid urbanization and rising urban poverty characterize much of Sub-Saharan Africa in the 21st Century. Africa’s urban transition provides the context within which this thesis examines the causes and consequences of poverty and food insecurity in the growing informal settlements of Windhoek, Namibia. Rapid urbanization in Windhoek has been accompanied by limited industrialization with few job ...
JOURNAL ARTICLES
Joint Spatial Modeling of Disease Risk Using Multiple Sources: An Application on HIV Prevalence from Antenatal Sentinel and Demographic and Health Surveys in Namibia
BACKGROUND: In disease mapping field, researchers often encounter data from multiple sources. Such data are fraught with challenges such as lack of a representative sample, often incomplete and most of which may have measurement errors, and may be spatially and temporally misaligned. This paper presents a joint model in the effort to deal with the sampling bias and misalignment. METHODS: A joint (bivariate) spatial model was applied to estimate HIV prevalence using two sources: 2014 National HIV Sentinel survey (NHSS) ...
Spatial Modelling of Childhood Indicators and Deprivation in Namibia
Socio-economic disadvantage (SED) is an established risk factor or effect modifier of child health status. Motivated by concerns of addressing health inequalities and social justice, this paper examined the place-specific association of SED with child health in Namibia. We explored this aspect by generating two local indicators of SED: material and earnings deprivation, and used a space-varying coefficients model, to estimate their effects on three child health outcomes (i.e., low birthweight, stunting and under-five mortality) in Namibia. Our findings, not ...
Migrant Windhoek: Rural–Urban Migration and Food Security in Namibia
The relationship between migration and food security in urban areas is an emerging area of research internationally. To date, with the exception of studies in India, Kenya, and Namibia, little attention has focused on food insecurity experienced by migrants in cities of the Global South. Building on earlier work in Namibia, this paper interrogates the relationship between migration and food security in the city of Windhoek. Windhoek has experienced significant rural–urban migration in recent years, especially since Namibia’s independence in ...
Hungry Cities: A Critical Review of Urban Food Security Research in Sub-Saharan African Cities
There has been renewed interest in the issue of food in cities in sub-Saharan Africa. A similar renewal has been noted in the North American and European contexts. However, the political, practical, and ideological starting points of these research endeavors are quite different. This paper presents a historical and political lens through which the trajectories of urban food research in sub-Saharan African can be understood. It begins with a historical analysis of the field and uses this to explain why ...