There is a human face behind the numbers,Food Insecurity in Cape Town’s Low-Income Communities through a Data Feminist Lens

This paper examines the persistence of household food insecurity in Cape Town, South Africa, in the context of overlapping and compounding crises. Drawing on two rounds of household survey data collected in 2023 and 2024 across six low-income communities, the analysis identifies key patterns of vulnerability, with 87% of households experiencing food insecurity in 2023 and 86% in 2024. Factors such as female-headed households, larger household size, and precarious or informal employment are associated with significantly higher odds of moderate or severe food insecurity.,Building on these findings, the paper argues that conventional quantitative approaches, while essential for capturing the scale and distribution of hunger, remain limited in their ability to account for its lived, embodied, and relational dimensions. Situated within a data feminist framework, the study integrates participatory and performative methodologies, including the Theatre of the Oppressed, as a means of reworking how food insecurity is interpreted and understood. Through a collaborative research process involving locally embedded enumerators and collective data interpretation, the paper demonstrates how alternative data practices can surface forms of knowledge that remain obscured in standardised metrics.,In doing so, the paper contributes to critical debates on knowledge production in urban Africa by showing how the combination of quantitative and embodied approaches can challenge dominant data practices and deepen understandings of structural vulnerability in contexts of inequality and crisis.