Child poverty and children’s rights of access to food and basic nutrition in South Africa: A contextual, jurisprudential and policy analysis

Research Report number 7. This research report is written by Prof Danwood Mzikenge Chirwa. Millions of children in South Africa bear the yoke of extreme forms of poverty and its associated evils, such as malnourishment, stunted growth, nutritional-deficiency diseases and illiteracy. The depreciation of the South African rand towards the end of 2008 and the current global financial crisis have only served to entrench child poverty by pushing poor households into deeper levels of deprivation and relegating those who were previously financially stable to the status of the poor.