Towards achieving food security in Africa, with special focus on United Nations (UN) Millennium Village Project in Kenya

Abstract

Food security is one of the major problems confronting Africa. Poverty has been attributed as the main cause of food insecurity and other associated problems such as hunger, famine, malnutrition, destitution and starvation. Several efforts have been made in the past to rescue Africa from these problems, but most of these effort have not translate to a better life for most especially rural Africans, who comprise of the majority of the African population. Most of the other regions of the world have made tremendous progress towards the food needs of their people and poverty eradication, but most Africans still wallow in extreme poverty. Many factors are responsible for this, most importantly ineffective and poor governance, corruption and several biophysical and economic constrains such as heavy dependency on rain-fed agricultural systems, extremely low productivity of food production, and heavy burden of infectious disease, especially malaria and HIV/AIDS.

For the first time in the history of the world, at the Millennium Summit in 2000, all the world leaders came together to proffer a lasting solution to problems confronting the world and agreed to work together to cut extreme poverty to half by 2015 and also tackled other social economic problems facing the world by formulating Millennium Development Goals. Because of special need and unique nature of Africa the Millennium Village Project was launched in 2004 with the hope that multifaceted nature of poverty in rural Africa can be overcome through targeted public-sector investment to raise rural productivity, which will enhance private saving and investment among the rural Africans. Achieving food security in rural Africa requires more than increase in agricultural productivity, but also the need to empower the villagers so as for them to gain economic power and propel them into the cash economy. From the interaction with the farmers and the project officials it was apparent that some progress has been made towards this, especially the dramatic increase in grain production and setting up of robust markets through the formation of a cereal bank which now guarantees farmers a better price and returns on their produce. However, this is just like a pilot project, the real challenges and the viability of the Millennium Village Project will be tested in the capability for a massive scale-up and the sustainability of the project in the long run.

Date of Award	2009
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Coventry University
Supervisor	Phil Harris (Supervisor) & Andrew Fox (Supervisor)