On World Hunger Day on 28 May, it is important to point out that more than one in five people in Africa go hungry today, and nearly six in 10 face moderate or severe food insecurity. The latest State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report shows hunger continuing to rise across the continent even as it falls elsewhere, and projects that by 2030, nearly 60% of the world’s chronically undernourished people will be African.
Africa is not short of evidence on how to feed itself. Across the continent, researchers, farmers, civil society organisations and policy institutes have spent decades documenting what works: which crops thrive under shifting climates; which markets serve the poor; which interventions reduce child stunting; and which trade rules either enable or undermine nutritious diets. The evidence base is rich, often locally generated and frequently ignored.
Hunger in Africa persists not primarily because of a lack of science, but because the connective tissue between evidence, policy and implementation is weak. Strategies sit on shelves. Cross-sectoral coordination falters. The voices most affected — women managing household food security, smallholder farmers and informal traders who actually feed African cities — remain at the edge of decision-making rather than at its centre. Many of the pressures driving hunger, including climate variability, food price volatility, disrupted supply chains and the spread of diet-related disease, do not respect national borders. They are regional phenomena, and they require regional responses.
The Africa Regional Collaborative for Agriculture, Nutrition and Health (ANH-ARC), launched in Accra on 30 April, is one route towards changing this. Co-led by the University of Ghana, Ethiopia’s Policy Studies Institute and Stellenbosch University, the ARC sets out to synthesise rigorously the evidence that already exists, commission and conduct new Africa-led research where existing evidence cannot answer the questions policymakers are asking, and connect both directly to the governments, regional bodies and continental institutions making decisions about food, agriculture, trade and health.
What distinguishes the ARC is its insistence that this connective work is itself a discipline, not a communications afterthought to research, but a sustained governance practice that requires its own evidence, methods, capabilities and institutional anchoring.
Three commitments give the initiative its shape.
The first is alignment with African priorities and frameworks. The ARC’s programme of work is explicitly designed around the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) 2026–2035, the Kampala Declaration on Agriculture and Food Security, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and Agenda 2063. These are not invoked as decorative references. The ARC will provide the analytical scaffolding to help governments translate continental commitments — including the Kampala pledge to ensure 60% of Africans can afford a healthy diet by 2035 — into the trade rules, fiscal instruments, procurement reforms and accountability systems that will determine whether those commitments mean anything in practice.
The second is gender equity and climate resilience as core analytical dimensions, not optional add-ons. African food systems are shaped by gendered patterns of food acquisition, unequal control over household resources and climate volatility that disrupts production, prices and access. A policy that ignores these realities will deliver unequal outcomes or fail under stress. The ARC’s evidence work, from trade modelling to lived-experience research, treats gender and climate as analytical lenses through which every intervention is examined.
The third — and this is where the work feels most distinctive — is governance, both as a focus of research and as a practice the collaborative actively cultivates. Stellenbosch University leads the ARC’s Science–Policy Interface and Food System Governance work, examining how CAADP commitments translate into national policy, how just transitions in livestock systems can balance climate, nutrition and livelihood objectives, and how multi-actor dialogue can navigate the political tensions that constrain reform.
Governance research, however, is only as useful as the governance capability of those doing the work. This is why the ARC anchors a Learning Centre for Food System Governance at Stellenbosch, delivered with Ghanaian and Ethiopian partners. Through six African Food Dialogues, structured Learning Labs in three countries, practitioner workshops and intergenerational sessions integrating postgraduate researchers with senior policy actors, the Learning Centre treats capacity extension as the route through which evidence becomes durable practice. The methodology builds on the Learning Journeys approach the Southern Africa Food Lab has refined since 2009, work that consistently shows that food systems change happens through sustained relationships, honest deliberation about trade-offs and the cultivation of governance skills among researchers, practitioners and policymakers alike.
What does this mean for ending hunger?
The ARC alone will not end hunger in Africa. No single initiative can. But it reflects a clear commitment to what ending hunger actually requires: Africa-led evidence, governance taken seriously as both a research subject and a practice, and the patient extension of capability across a continent that has never lacked knowledge, only the institutional means to act on it. On this World Hunger Day, the challenge is not to reinvent what we already know. It is to create the conditions under which Africa-led knowledge, coordinated action and political commitment can finally deliver the healthier and more resilient food systems the continent needs.
Scott Drimie is Professor (Extraordinary) at the Division of Human Nutrition in the Department of Global Health at Stellenbosch University.
On World Hunger Day on 28 May, it is important to point out that more than one in five people in Africa go hungry today, and nearly six in 10 face moderate or severe food insecurity.
