Gambiaj.com – (BANJUL, The Gambia) – Close to half a million Gambians went hungry last year, and almost half the population could not afford a healthy diet, according to the newly released State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026 (SOFI 2026), the flagship annual report jointly published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), UNICEF, the World Food Programme (WFP), and the World Health Organization (WHO).
The report’s country-level data paint a picture of a nation that, on hunger and food insecurity, has essentially stood still for two decades but one that has quietly outperformed many of its West African neighbors on child nutrition, even as the cost of eating well continues to climb.
Hunger holding steady, food insecurity high
According to the report’s statistical annexes, the prevalence of undernourishment in The Gambia was 17.5 percent over 2023–2025, barely changed from 17.6 percent back in 2004–2006, meaning roughly one in every six Gambians, or an estimated 500,000 people, habitually did not get enough to eat, essentially unchanged in real terms from two decades ago even as the population has grown.
The picture looks starker when measured by lived experience rather than calories alone. Using the Food Insecurity Experience Scale, FAO estimates that 17.6 percent of Gambians faced severe food insecurity in 2023–2025, meaning they likely went without food for a whole day at times.
Meanwhile, a much larger 47.2 percent, or about 1.3 million people, experienced moderate or severe food insecurity, unable to consistently guarantee themselves a nutritious and sufficient diet. Comparable data for 2014–2016 was not available in the report, limiting the ability to track the trend over time.
Still, that 47.2 percent figure puts The Gambia in a notably better position than the West Africa subregion as a whole, where a full 62.0 percent of the population faced moderate or severe food insecurity in 2023–2025, up sharply from 39.5 percent a decade earlier.
The report singles out Western Africa for a “notable 57 percent increase” in food insecurity since the 2015 launch of the Sustainable Development Goals, one of the steepest deteriorations of any subregion in the world, even as food insecurity eased elsewhere in Africa in 2025.
A bright spot: falling child stunting, rising breastfeeding
Where The Gambia’s numbers genuinely stand out is in child nutrition. The prevalence of stunting, children too short for their age due to chronic undernutrition, fell from 22.5 percent in 2012 to 14.0 percent in 2024, according to the FAO data.
That is a far steeper improvement than the West African average, which moved only from 33.8 percent to 29.7 percent over the same period, and suggests Gambian nutrition and health interventions of the past decade have had a genuine, measurable impact on young children’s growth.
Exclusive breastfeeding of infants under six months also improved dramatically, from 33.2 percent in 2012 to 53.6 percent in 2024, well above the West African regional average of 34.6 percent and even above the global average of 47.4 percent.
Anemia among women of reproductive age, while still alarmingly high, declined from 53.1 percent in 2012 to 46.1 percent in 2023, bucking a global trend in which the report notes anemia among women is “worsening” almost everywhere.
Not every indicator moved in the right direction, however. Overweight among children under five edged up from 1.9 percent to 2.7 percent, and adult obesity more than kept pace with global trends, climbing from 7.6 percent in 2012 to 12.4 percent in 2024, evidence of the so-called “double burden of malnutrition,” in which undernutrition and rising obesity coexist in the same population and often the same households.
Only 22.8 percent of Gambian children aged 6 to 23 months were found to be eating a minimally diverse diet, below the global average of 30.8 percent, a sign that even where calories are sufficient, dietary quality for young children remains a concern.
The rising cost of eating well
Perhaps the most immediate pressure on Gambian households is cost. FAO’s data show the price of a healthy diet in The Gambia has risen from the equivalent of 2.69 purchasing-power-parity (PPP) dollars per person per day in 2017 to 4.49 PPP dollars in 2025, an increase of roughly 67 percent in under a decade, and a cost that now sits above the West African subregional average of 4.21 PPP dollars.
Despite that rising price tag, the share of Gambians unable to afford a healthy diet has stayed comparatively steady, moving from 43.6 percent in 2017 to a peak of 45.0 percent in 2024 before easing slightly to 43.7 percent in 2025, equivalent to roughly 1.2 million people.
That is a markedly smaller share than the West African average, where 70.4 percent of the population could not afford a healthy diet in 2025, up from 66.7 percent in 2017.
In other words, while a healthy diet costs more in The Gambia than in many neighboring countries, Gambians on average are relatively better able to afford it than their regional peers.
This is a fact that speaks to household coping strategies and food markets that have so far absorbed price shocks better than much of the subregion.
A mixed picture within a fragile region
The Gambia’s numbers sit within a broader global report that struck a cautiously hopeful tone. SOFI 2026 found that global hunger declined for a third consecutive year in 2025, easing to 7.8 percent of the world’s population, about 645 million people, down from 8.1 percent in 2024 and 8.6 percent in 2022.
The report credited steady improvement in Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean and noted that “the prolonged upward trend in hunger in Africa has come to a halt.”
Africa, nonetheless, recorded the highest regional hunger rate in the world and, for the first time, overtook Asia as the region with the largest absolute number of hungry people, 309 million, compared with 292 million in Asia.
Globally, the report also found that progress on child and maternal nutrition targets remains “far too slow,” with anaemia in women worsening in most regions and adult obesity climbing steadily worldwide, trends that, the Gambia-specific data suggest, are being felt locally even as the country’s stunting and breastfeeding numbers move in the right direction.
What the numbers mean for policy
Taken together, the SOFI 2026 findings suggest that while The Gambia has avoided the sharpest food security deterioration seen elsewhere in West Africa and the Sahel in recent years, hunger and food insecurity remain entrenched rather than declining, and the cost of a nutritious diet continues to climb faster than many households can absorb.
The child-nutrition gains, sharply lower stunting, and much higher breastfeeding rates point to real returns on past investment in maternal and child health programming, even as rising obesity and persistently low dietary diversity among young children signal that the next phase of the country’s nutrition challenge will look different from the last.
For a country of roughly 2.7 million people, the report’s figures translate into a stark reality: hundreds of thousands of Gambians are going hungry, and well over a million are unable to reliably afford the food that would keep them healthy, even as the data offer genuine grounds for cautious optimism on how far child nutrition has come.
Source: FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, and WHO (2026). The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026.
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