NCDs

In 2022, Coca-Cola sold more than 1.3 billion unit cases of beverages across the African continent - a volume that had grown at roughly 4 to 6 per cent annually through the preceding decade, outpacing every other major global market except India. Nielsen retail audit data compiled for the same period estimated that carbonated soft drink sales volumes across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) had doubled since 2010, with the fastest growth concentrated in Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. These are not niche consumption patterns. They are the front edge of a nutrition transition whose health consequences are already measurable in clinical registries across the region.

Sub-Saharan Africa is changing - faster, more profoundly, and with more complex nutritional consequences than most public health systems are equipped to track. In the span of a single generation, countries across the region have seen large rural-to-urban migrations reshape both the food supply and the food environment; global trade liberalisation and foreign direct investment have introduced multinational food manufacturers and mass-market retailers into markets previously dominated by local staples and informal vendors; and television, mobile data, and social media have transformed the aspirational food culture of urban youth. The outcome is a nutrition transition definition that moves from the textbook to the concrete: a rapid, often compressed, and unevenly distributed shift in dietary patterns that is simultaneously producing persistent undernutrition in some populations and accelerating non-communicable disease (NCD) risk in others.