Roughly 2.5 million South Africans experience hunger every day. Nearly half of the adult population live below the upper-bound poverty line and 1 in 5 South Africans live in extreme poverty. For the past two decades, the country has been hard hit by severe climate events, devastating the agriculture sector and leading to severe food insecurity, hunger and malnutrition, unemployment and growing poverty. The COVID-19 has only magnified the challenges, disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable populations.
For more than a decade, INMED Aquaponics® has strengthened food security in vulnerable communities in five of South Africa’s nine provinces and has provided the necessary training and economic development for women, youth and people with disabilities to create sustainable incomes and achieve self-reliance. With an impact investment from Mondelēz International’s Sustainable Futures Fund, the INMED Aquaponics® Social Enterprise (INMED ASE) takes it a step further by incubating agro-enterprises to multiply the effect.
In its first year of operation, the INMED ASE has achieved dramatic impacts.