Food Availability, Accessibility, and Climate Change in Africa: Religion as a Transforming Structure-Process

Factors such as the chronic hunger challenge in Africa, the exponential rise in the number of Africans needing food as a matter of emergency, the COVID-19 pandemic, the impacts of conflicts, and the worsening climate crisis consistently reveal that food availability and accessibility are primary casualties of Africa’s livelihoods vulnerability context. Religious institutions and actors are increasingly involved in the fight against hunger to achieve Zero Hunger by 2030. This involvement, however, appears to be primarily appraised in terms of the social capital of religious communities, entities, and leaders. This makes them a valuable network that is close to the grassroots and effective in the distribution of food interventions as well as the execution of policies and strategies that have been conceptualized and planned at other levels and spaces that rarely include religious institutions and contributions. This approach has limited effectiveness in a context where religion is deeply and extensively embedded in every sphere of private and social life. This chapter probes the potential role that religion in Africa can play in addressing food availability and accessibility. The chapter will focus specifically on climate change as it affects food availability and accessibility and the extent to which religion in Africa can be assessed as a resource or impediment to food availability and accessibility. I use the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF), particularly the idea of Transforming Structures and Processes (TSP), as an effective framework for reimagining religion in order to best understand its role in food availability and accessibility.