Food Security in Africa's Secondary Cities: No. 1. Mzuzu, Malawi

This report marks the first stage of AFSUN’s goal of expanding knowledge about urban food systems and experiences of household food insecurity in secondary African cities. With regard specifically to studies of food security in urban Malawi, the report builds on two previous AFSUN studies. The first was conducted as part of a regional 11-city baseline food security survey in Blantyre and provided a partial picture of the city through a geographical focus on a transitioning peri-urban area in South Lunzu Ward (Mvula and Chiweza, 2013). Relative to the low-income urban neighbourhoods in other Southern African cities, the Blantyre case study found high levels of food security and extremely high rates of households producing their own food (Frayne et al., 2010; Riley and Legwegoh, 2014). The second survey was conducted in 2015 in six informal neighbourhoods in Lilongwe and found extremely high rates of food insecurity (Chilanga et al., 2017). The difference with Blantyre was suggestive of a deteriorating situation due to the poor harvest in 2015 and the tumultuous political and economic changes in the country between 2008 and 2015, but was also reflective of differences between peri-urban areas and urban informal settlements within Malawi.