What's cooking? Adding critical feminist research to the pot - Community kitchens, school feeding programmes, and savings schemes in Cape Town, Nairobi, and Ouagadougou

Abstract

TMG’s Urban Food Futures programme closes its scoping phase with a series of reports summarising the main insights lying the foundation for the next phase of action research. Grounded in the right to food and the six dimensions of food security, this working paper explores how community kitchens, school feeding programmes, and informal saving schemes work and how communities use them to cope with shocks. The paper investigates how vulnerable urban communities in Ouagadougou, Nairobi, and Cape Town use these three components to combat hunger and food insecurity in times of crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic, violent evictions, and armed conflicts. The paper further explores both the potential and the barriers of these initiatives to become urban nutrition hubs, places where community members engage in dialogues and build social capital to understand the structural conditions of hunger and what they can do to address them.

CULTIVATING FOOD JUSTICE: Redefining Harvest Sales for Sustainable Urban Agriculture in Low‐Income Cape Town post Covid‐19

“…Community kitchens across the Cape Flats could become clients for UCGs’ harvests (see Battersby et al ., 2022). During the Covid‐19 lockdowns, hundreds of community‐based soup kitchens operated on the Cape Flats and surrounding areas.…”