Track: Human Factors and Ergonomics

Abstract

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) is one the largest region in the African continent. The region is made of fifteen countries. Over the current decade, this region has been going through a critical food crisis, particularly within the disadvantage rural areas. In order to relieve this situation, the state members of the SADC region have come up with various strategies such as the program called zero hunger and the second one called the outcome seven. These programs are designed to create a future environment where households are not dealing with issues relating to food insecurity. However, these approaches have not yet met the expected result because the trend of food dearth still rising considerably at regional and national level. To this end, this paper aims at measuring the main issues impacting negatively on food security at household level. At least ten countries out of fifteen countries that composed the SADC region were used as case study. To date, various studies have been carried out investigating the issues related to food insecurity at country’ level in the region. However, there is lack of such study at regional level, hence, this paper aims at bridging this gap. The data were collected through quantitative approach at least 960 participants were involved in this research by answering to the questionnaires presented to them. The findings revealed that inequality in land distribution, unemployment, inflation, inequality in wealth distribution, shortage of adequate labor, HIV disease, households gender head, education status of household head, age are contributing to food crisis in all ten states of SADC region are the major concern towards food security.