Food insecurity among students in Open Distance and e-Learning in South Africa

Objective: Food insecurity is a widely studied phenomenon; however, studies documenting food insecurity among Open Distance and e-Learning students are sadly lacking. This paper aim of this paper is to study the prevalence of food insecurity among Open Distance and e-Learning students in South Africa. The purpose is to test the common assumption that Open Distance and e-Learning students do not struggle with food insecurity as they are typically living at home or employed. Method: The method used in this paper was an online anonymous version of the Food Insecurity Experience Scale and was administered through Qualtrics. Results: Only 27.9% (n = 2084) of respondents were food secure and mildly food insecure (score of 1 to 4), while those who were moderately food insecure constituted 16.7% (n =1250) of the sample (score of 5 to 6) and those with severe food insecurity constituted 55% (n = 4130). The dependent variable was not normally distributed and therefore nonparametric measures were used to test for differences in groups, namely, the Kruskal-Wallis and the Mann-Whitney U tests. Conclusion: The results show that African students are more likely to experience food insecurity compared to their counterparts, while there were no substantive differences in gender. Members of the LGBTQI community were also shown to be at higher risk of food insecurity. Those whose primary income was either grants or income from an informal business were at higher risk of food insecurity than those who worked full time. The findings of this study underscore the pervasive nature of food insecurity among students in South African Open, Distance and e-Learning education (c) 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)