adminDumisani Nsingo Senior Farming Reporter
USAID’s five-year Amalima programme aimed at lessening the negative impact of drought in communities in parts of Matabeleland North and South provinces has started yielding positive results. The five-year programme was implemented by a consortium of six non-governmental organisations, namely Organisation for Rural Associations for Progress, Dabane Trust, International Medical Corps, Africare, The Manoff Group and the leading partner Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture.
It started late in 2013, but its effective rollout began last year, targeting districts such as Tsholotsho (Matabeleland North), Bulilima, Mangwe and Gwanda (all in Matabeleland South). The districts were selected on the basis of high malnutrition and food insecurity levels.
Amalima builds on existing communal initiatives to strengthen food and nutrition security and enhance households’ and communities’ resilience to economic shock and natural disasters by mobilising people around ideas they own. In order to achieve this objective, Amalima fosters women’s empowerment and gender equality as a cross-cutting component to the programme that underpins all activities.
Speaking at a tour of Gwanda district recently, Amalima Agriculture and Resilience manager Mr Godfrey Nehanda said the programme recently completed its second year of implementation, during which it responded to the poor rains of the 2014/15 cropping season with a comprehensive drought mitigation strategy.
The strategy included increased livestock management and irrigated horticulture trainings, community Cash for Assets activities and a household asset voucher programme.
“We have gone through a drought and there are predictions of an Elmino so it’s another drought. So when you look at our Cash for Asset intervention we really intended to put into place assets or rehabilitate assets that will make these communities more resilient,” Mr Nehanda said.
Amalima uses Cash for Assets as a strategy to get vital cash in the hands of vulnerable households, while contributing to achieving Disaster Risk Reduction. The programme pays beneficiaries a daily wage by using the labour to produce shared community assets such as dams, dip tanks and irrigation schemes.
Cash for Assets is an important activity to Amalima’s drought mitigation strategy as it aims to address increased food insecurity caused by poor rains and in some cases, near complete crop losses.
“If you put a dam in place, it will be obviously for animals and people because they both need water. So it makes them more resilient and they can use that water to irrigate their crops but more importantly it’s for stock watering because this is a livestock area. The programme also looks at restoring community assets such as grazing land, dip tanks, irrigation schemes and dams,” Mr Nehanda said.
He said since livestock was a major livelihood for most people in Matabeleland the non-governmental consortium initiated a number of animal health and nutrition training courses in the districts it operates. In the process it has trained 7 901 farmers.
“Livestock is a major livelihood activity in this area so our programmes are targeting livestock farmers. These farmers have their own group and we train them in three main areas. Firstly we train them in nutrition because it is important for the survival of the animal and also for breeding.
“Secondly we are targeting health issues and our motto is prevention. Of course there is a need for treatment when necessary but you know when an animal is well looked after, it’s given good nutrition, its vaccinated and prevented from tick-borne diseases, you reduce the chances of getting diseases. The third thing that we are doing is breed improvement,” Mr Nehanda said.
In an effort to improve cattle breed, the organisation embarked in Artificial Insemination (AI) but the programme failed to yield the desired results owing to farmers’ lack of knowledge about the concept with only 521 farmers adopting it.
“The challenge is that we probably introduced AI in a rush and made an assumption that farmers will quickly understand issues around the importance of nutrition to get this programme to be successful . . . farmers rushed in to bring their animals without taking care of the nutrition requirements and putting them in condition so that they conceive.
“As a result the conceiving rate was a little lower than we expected but all the same we have discussed with the service provider so that he comes for a second round of AI and that’s going to be done when the rains fall and there is lash grass and when probably cows and heifers are in a better condition and they should be able to conceive that way,” Mr Nehanda said.
The NGO grouping has also constructed and rehabilitated 11 dip tanks in a bid to curb tick borne diseases from affecting livestock.
“Tsholotsho had not received support from other programmes. If you look at the other districts Gwanda, Bulilima and Mangwe they have been supported by other programmes like PRIZE (Promoting Recovery in Zimbabwe) before, but Tsholotsho was left out. So we are trying to put more effort on Tsholotsho so that we put them at the same level as the other districts. So in Tsholotsho we have done eight dip tanks,” Mr Nehanda said.
On the cropping side 17 621 farmers were trained in conservation agriculture to date.
There is also a Household Asset Voucher programme where farmers are bought farming inputs to the tune of $150.
Bongani Ndlovu