Every day in South Africa, the equivalent of a classroom full of children dies from hunger, activist Mark Heywood told The Gathering 2025.
Every day in South Africa, the equivalent of a classroom full of children dies from hunger, activist Mark Heywood told The Gathering 2025.
Every day in South Africa, an average of 30 children die from starvation and extreme malnutrition - nearly 11,000 deaths a year, deaths that could have been prevented if the children had had reliable and sustainable access to food.
This is what Mark Heywood, activist, former Maverick Citizen editor and founder of the Justice and Activism Hub (JAH), told a packed Cape Town International Convention Centre during The Gathering 2025, Daily Maverick's flagship annual event, on Thursday, 28 August.
In his presentation - The Cost of an Empty Stomach - Heywood highlighted the depths of South Africa's hunger crisis, from the failure to turn the Constitution into a living document to the government's failure to adequately tackle the crisis, and retailers' massive profits on food while children die from malnutrition.
"[These children] die in a country which has this much-vaunted, brilliant Constitution, something that I have resorted to and turned back to time and time again in my activism, a Constitution that says everyone in South Africa has the right to sufficient food and water, and...
