Progress exists. The latest UN assessment reports a modest fall in global hunger. Yet across much of Africa, the trend bends the other way. The cause is not a single villain but a stack: climate shocks, conflict lines, currency slides, costly imports, and overstretched budgets. Households don’t experience these as theories; they feel them as a shorter meal and a longer walk to market.

The Numbers Behind the Narrative

The 2025 edition of The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) finds global undernourishment edging down, while most African subregions report increases—a divergence that has hardened since 2020. The World Food Programme’s Global Report on Food Crises 2025 tracks 295 million people facing acute food insecurity across 53 countries, with the heaviest concentration in Africa. These are not modelled futures; they are households in IPC Phase 3+ now.

The Climate Shock Loop

Weather isn’t background; it’s the price setter. The Horn of Africa’s sequence—multi-year drought, then destructive floods—shreds planting calendars and livestock herds. Southern Africa’s maize belt swings between heat stress and late rains, cutting yields just as fertilizer prices spike. In pastoral zones, pasture failure means distress sales; in coastal zones, storms strand feeder roads and ports. Risk piles up where maps are already thin.

Conflict and Supply Chains

Conflict dislocates more than families; it dislocates markets. West and Central Africa’s lean season now intersects with active displacement corridors, pushing up prices in urban centres that host new arrivals. In eastern DRC and parts of Sudan, logistics risk makes aid irregular and farming dangerous. When violence and weather coincide, procurement shifts to cash markets, where prices punish the poor first and worst.

Food Imports, Currency, and Debt

Import bills are the quiet villain. Many economies rely on wheat, rice, and edible oil imports priced in strong currencies. When exchange rates slide, calories cost more. Governments juggle scarce foreign exchange between fuel, food, and debt service. Temporary relief measures—VAT cuts, fuel subsidies—help briefly but strain budgets that already carry high interest costs. Without cheaper finance and better storage, each shock becomes a fiscal aftershock.

The Social Ledger: Women, Children, Migration

Hunger is a gendered statistic. Women often eat last and least, and girls’ school attendance dips when food runs short. Health clinics report more low-birth-weight infants after bad harvests. Migration becomes a household strategy: one earner leaves for seasonal work, remittances stabilize the rest. These choices are rational; they are also exhausting.

Drivers at a Glance — What’s Really Moving the Numbers

What Works—And Travels

The fixes that stick are boring and measurable: drought-tolerant seeds tied to credit; micro-irrigation with prepaid solar pumps; feeder-road upgrades where markets actually sit; early-warning systems linked to parametric insurance; school feeding that buys from local farmers; digital vouchers that travel across borders with displaced families. None of these win speeches. All of them win meals.

Analytical Lens — The Geography of Responsibility

Neutrality demands clarity. Africa’s hunger rise is not a moral failure of families; it is a systems failure we can count. The math says climate volatility plus conflict plus expensive imported calories equals persistent undernourishment. The remedies are equally countable: cheaper finance for storage and irrigation, rules that keep borders open when crops fail, and social protection that pays out on time. Progress elsewhere does not absolve us of arithmetic here.