A systematic review of sub-national food insecurity research in South Africa: Missed opportunities for policy insights.

Food insecurity is an intractable problem in South Africa. The country has a tradition of evidence-based decision making, grounded in the findings of national surveys. However, the rich insights from sub-national surveys remain a largely untapped resource for understandings of the contextual experience of food insecurity.

Determinants of livelihood in the era of widespread access to ART.

We have only just begun to understand the long-term impact of living with chronic HIV on health and livelihood after a decade of widespread access to treatment in southern Africa. This paper explores health and well-being, disability, and livelihood dynamics among people living with HIV (PLHIV) in a public healthcare setting in South Africa. We undertook a cross-sectional survey among a cohort of 1042 people on ART and explored associations between socio-demographic characteristics, treatment adherence, measures of disability (functional and activity limitations), livelihood resources (capitals) and outcomes, including food security, and exposure to livelihood shocks.

Stepping Stones and Creating Futures intervention: shortened interrupted time series evaluation of a behavioural and structural health promotion and violence prevention intervention for young people in informal settlements in Durban, South Africa.

Background: Gender-based violence and HIV are highly prevalent in the harsh environment of informal settlements and reducing violence here is very challenging. The group intervention Stepping Stones has been shown to reduce men's perpetration of violence in more rural areas, but violence experienced by women in the study was not affected. Economic empowerment interventions with gender training can protect older women from violence, but microloan interventions have proved challenging with young women.

Combined structural interventions for gender equality and livelihood security: a critical review of the evidence from southern and eastern Africa and the implications for young people.

Background: Young people in southern and eastern Africa remain disproportionately vulnerable to HIV with gender inequalities and livelihood insecurities being key drivers of this. Behavioural HIV prevention interventions have had weak outcomes and a new generation of structural interventions have emerged seeking to challenge the wider drivers of the HIV epidemic, including gender inequalities and livelihood insecurities.

Methods: We searched key academic data bases to identify interventions that simultaneously sought to strengthen people's livelihoods and transform gender relationships that had been evaluated in southern and eastern Africa.