SOUTH AFRICA

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.

Located in Vanderbiljpark, Johannesburg in the Gauteng Province, the INMED ASE hub farm and training center houses commercial aquaponics systems for food production as well as technical and business support services. Aquaponics farmers, for example, can take advantage of the INMED ASE consolidation center to sell their harvests at higher market rates than they could reap on their own, as well as purchase inputs, such as seedlings and fingerlings, at bulk prices. The INMED ASE includes satellite centers run by INMED Aquaponics-trained farming cooperatives, schools, and communities in Gauteng, Eastern Cape, Free State, Northern Cape and Limpopo provinces to provide local training and support to bolster food security and regional economic development. 

For more information about the INMED ASE in South Africa, email contact@inmed.org.

The INMED ASE is an initiative of INMED Partnerships for Children with seed funding from Mondelēz International via its new Sustainable Futures impact investing platform, which seeks to incubate, finance and support self sustaining ventures that address key challenges in the world. INMED South Africa is facilitating the first INMED ASE in South Africa.

The evolution of the INMED ASE also has been more than a decade in the making, with pilot projects throughout South Africa, Jamaica and Latin America. The first INMED ASE in South Africa is made possible by a culmination of support from a variety of forward-thinking partners, including the Mondelēz International Foundation, Air Products, USAID, Old Mutual, BioTherm, the South Africa Offices of the President, the Ministries of Agriculture and Education, the Rupert Foundation, the City of Johannesburg and Nelson Mandela University, among others.