Food insecurity among older persons in the Southern African Development Community: a scoping review

Despite the heterogenous challenges of growing older in low- and middle-income settings, there is a deficiency of research explicating food insecurity among older persons. Given rapid population ageing in Sub-Saharan Africa, alongside worsening deprivation, this paper offers an interrogation of existing evidence and exposes concomitant shortfalls in the knowledgebase. Scoping review methodology was employed using PRISMA Guidelines which systematically searched and screened three academic databases. At the global level, climate shifts and natural disasters, pandemics and epidemics such as Coronavirus-2019 and HIV/AIDS affect food insecurity. At a national level, food and welfare systems play a comparatively well-researched role in food insecurity among older persons. Community factors; levels of self-mobilisation or actions of civil society, and intrahousehold dynamics of kinship and associated resource distribution also proved important variables in determining food insecurity. Finally, demographic characteristics; age, marital status, gender, physical and cognitive abilities and coping mechanisms are discussed. In critical review, the work identifies two salient shortcomings in the understanding of food insecurity among older persons. One, extant research fails to account for path dependency, either within the lives of older persons, or socio-economic and political structures surrounding them. The findings, therefore, call for greater impetus upon the adoption of a life-course perspective. Two, scholars have failed to acknowledge older persons' role in shaping these structures and the food/welfare matrix at large. The work concludes by advocating for further theoretical development toward a comprehensive political economy of food insecurity, accounting for changes in the life-course of the individual, and the food, family and welfare systems in which they find themselves.