Given Hapunda

201 Introduction and Background Worldwide, 800 million people are still undernourished. In developing countries, 27% of children under the age of five years are underweight, 32% are stunted and 10% are classified as wasted (De Lange, 2010). Malnutrition is a public health crisis in South Africa (SA), contributing to illness and death in young children. Most South African children are stunted because of a lack of adequate nutrition at an early age, which leads to illness and psychosocial stress which are the most significant immediate causes of malnutrition (Willey et al ., 2009; Kuzwayo, 2008). In SA, under-nutrition affect mostly young children residing in rural areas, where parents have little education, low or no income and live in poor environmental conditions (Iversen et al ., 2011). Study conducted on children (1-5 years) reported that 20% of the children were stunted and 6.8% were underweight, which confirms that underweight and stunting are prevalent in children younger than five years (Iversen et al ., 2011). Furthermore, these were indicated to be a problem in the Free State, Northern Cape, Limpopo Provinces (Department of Health (DOH), 2008) and Eastern Cape (UNICEF, 2008). Several studies conducted in South Africa have found that Human Immune Virus (HIV) is also affecting the nutritional status of children under the age of six. For every stage of life, good nutrition is needed for survival, physical growth, psychological development, performance and good health (WHO & UNICEF, 2010:2). The nutritional status of children in South Africa is presented in Figure 2, in terms of anthropometric indices (adopted from SANHANES, 2013). South Africa is classified as a middle-income and developing country consisting of nine provinces with inter-provincial differences in income, employment and other general standards of living as well as socio-economic differences in the standard of living between rural, informal and urban households. This situation is attributed to the unemployment rate of more than 40%, especially in poor communities (Iversen et al ., 2011), which could be responsible for morbidity, mortality and poor growth in children for the past decade, as reported by several studies conducted in South Africa (Steyn, 2008:).