July 2026
Global hunger eased again in 2025, and the long rise in Africa’s hunger prevalence was interrupted. The harder problem is affordability. A healthy diet remains beyond the reach of most Africans, and that is where food systems policy now has to concentrate.
Dr Tshilidzi Madzivhandila
Chief Executive Officer and Head of Mission, FANRPAN
The 2026 edition of The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World records a third consecutive year of gradual global improvement. About 645 million people faced hunger in 2025, some 14 million fewer than in 2024. For Africa there is a more particular finding. The prevalence of hunger on the continent declined slightly in 2025, interrupting an upward trend that had run since 2017.
This should be noted carefully, not celebrated. A single year’s movement in a prevalence rate is not the same as a fall in the number of people going hungry, and the continental burden remains the heaviest in the world. Hunger affected 309 million people in Africa in 2025, one in five of the population, and 56 percent of those projected to face hunger globally in 2030 are expected to be African.
Beneath these numbers lies a slower problem that more calories will not resolve.
Affordability is where Africa is losing ground
It helps to keep four things apart; that is, (i) Hunger, measured as undernourishment, concerns insufficient dietary energy; (ii) Moderate or severe food insecurity, which affected 56.6 percent of Africa’s population in 2025, concerns how reliably people obtain food at all, (iii) Diet quality concerns what is actually eaten, and (v) Affordability concerns whether a nutritious diet is within economic reach.
On the third measure, the dietary-diversity data reveal the scale of the nutrition challenge. Only one in five African children aged 6 to 23 months achieves a minimally diverse diet, against 30.8 percent globally, and among African women aged 15 to 49 the figure is 43 percent. Cost is one influence among several on what households eat, alongside incomes, food environments and preference. It nonetheless sets a floor below which better diets are difficult to achieve.
On the fourth measure, the continent is going backwards. Globally, the share of people unable to afford a healthy diet fell to 32.7 percent in 2025, around 2.69 billion people. In Africa it rose to 66.6 percent, more than double the levels recorded in Asia and in Latin America and the Caribbean. Two out of every three Africans cannot cover the cost of a healthy diet even at the cheapest local prices, and that share is climbing in Africa while it falls in other regions.
African governments have already put this on record. The Kampala CAADP Declaration, adopted in January 2025, commits member states to “ensuring that 60% of the population can afford a healthy diet” by 2035. Roughly one in three can today. Reaching sixty percent within a decade, from a position moving the wrong way, is among the most demanding undertakings in the Declaration.
Prices are set along the whole chain, not only on the farm
A healthy diet cost 4.4 purchasing power parity dollars per person per day in Africa in 2025. That figure is a benchmark assembled from the cheapest locally available items in each food group, not a record of household spending. Animal source foods are the most expensive group on the continent, with 69 percent of African countries in the costliest third worldwide for that group.
Much of what consumers pay accumulates after produce leaves the farm. Post-farmgate activities account for 70 to 75 percent of consumer food expenditure worldwide, a large part of it in midstream processing, logistics and wholesale. That is a global estimate rather than an African one, and I would not assume the proportions are identical here. Across countries, stronger logistics performance, better roads, cheaper mobile connectivity and lower electricity costs are each associated with a lower cost of a healthy diet. These are associations rather than demonstrated causes, yet they point towards investments our infrastructure plans already contain.
Africa’s exposure is plain. Rapid population growth, climate extremes such as El Niño and vulnerability to energy price shocks all press on agrifood systems here. When energy costs rise, nutrient-dense foods rise faster than others, because they depend on cold chains, processing and transport.
Where public money goes
Starchy staples provide about half the calories in the healthy diet basket and only around one-sixth of its cost. Animal source foods, fruits and vegetables make up close to 70 percent of the cost. Public support has not followed that distribution. Seventy percent of global agricultural support to producers remains tied to grains, sugar, dairy, beef and oil crops, and policy attention still concentrates on primary production rather than where consumer costs build up.
The modelling should give pause to anyone confident that broader staple subsidies are the answer. Extending fiscal support to food groups that are already cheap yields little improvement in affordability, and can raise the total cost of a healthy diet by drawing land, labour and capital away from other value chains. A 10 percent production subsidy is modelled to lower the cost of a healthy diet by 4.4 percent in Africa, against 8.1 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean. The instrument African governments reach for most often returns the least here.
Staple-food security remains essential, and nothing in this evidence argues for loosening that commitment. The case is for extending the same seriousness to horticulture, legumes, livestock, fisheries and the systems that move them, so that nutrient-dense foods count as part of food security rather than a separate commercial matter.
What the Kampala period has to deliver
Six shifts would bring the commitment within reach.
- Measurement: National and subnational estimates of the cost of a healthy diet, built from national retail price data, should become routine. Annual averages conceal seasonal and geographic variation, and policy that cannot see it cannot respond to it.
- Planning: Member states are to integrate the Kampala Declaration into national and regional agrifood systems investment plans by 2028. Affordability belongs in those plans as a costed objective with a named budget line.
- Value chains and markets: Investment in transport, energy, storage, cold chains, processing and regional markets can contribute significantly to reducing the cost of nutritious foods. This is where the Declaration’s targets on post-harvest losses, local processing and intra-African trade meet.
- Sequencing: Social protection, school feeding and related demand-side measures are necessary. Where demand for nutritious food grows faster than supply, however, prices rise and affordability worsens. Supply expansion needs to come first or move alongside it.
- Safeguards: Lower prices obtained by degrading soils and water, weakening food safety or pushing rural workers into precarious work shift the cost somewhere less visible. Price is in any case only one determinant of what people eat.
- Accountability: The biennial agricultural review begins in 2027, with reporting to the Assembly from 2028, and parliaments have been asked to align budgets and provide oversight. Affordability will either be tracked there or quietly drift.
Reforms of this kind redistribute costs and benefits. Whether small-scale producers, especially women and young people, gain or absorb the burden will turn on land tenure, credit and the terms on which technology reaches them.
Africa already has enough evidence to justify action, even as important measurement gaps remain. What is thin is the connective work between analysis and delivery: price data granular enough to guide targeting, budget lines that name affordability, capacity in the institutions expected to carry it, and review processes with enough standing to matter. FANRPAN’s role is to support the translation of evidence into policy dialogue, investment choices and accountable implementation across African food systems, as our national nodes and partners continue to do.
Governments and regional bodies would do well to treat the cost of a healthy diet as a headline measure of food systems performance, alongside production and trade. Development partners can help most by financing the parts of the chain that attract least attention. Researchers can supply ministries with the subnational price data targeting requires. Firms building markets for nutrient-dense foods will be working where demand is going to grow.
The interruption in Africa’s rising hunger prevalence is worth having. Holding it depends on whether good food becomes something ordinary households can actually buy.
Principal sources
FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO. 2026. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026: Understanding and addressing the high cost of a healthy diet. Rome.
FAO. 2026. FAOSTAT: Cost and Affordability of a Healthy Diet. Rome.
FAO. 2026. FAOSTAT: Suite of Food Security Indicators. Rome.
African Union. 2025. Kampala CAADP Declaration on Building Resilient and Sustainable Agrifood Systems in Africa. Ext./Assembly/Decl./3(XIX), adopted at the Extraordinary Summit, Kampala, 9 to 11 January 2025.
African Union. 2025. CAADP Strategy and Action Plan 2026 to 2035. Addis Ababa.