Chronicle Editor
Sukulwenkosi Dube-Matutu – [email protected]
MATABELELAND region is poised for increased horticulture production and improved livelihoods through enhanced earnings under the Zimbabwe Smallholder Horticulture Empowerment and Promotion Project (ZIM-SHEP), an initiative supported by the Government in partnership with Japan.
The programme seeks to empower smallholder farmers with knowledge and best practices to adopt market-oriented agriculture techniques. It also seeks to upgrade farmers from subsistence to commercial level.
Zimbabwe started implementing the horticulture empowerment and promotion programme in Mashonaland East in 2014 before it spread to other provinces and is now focused on Matabeleland North and South. The Government officially launched ZIM-SHEP in 2019 with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) sponsorship.
ZIM-SHEP is also expected to promote market access and participation by small-scale farmers, help farmers develop technical and managerial capacity to practice market-oriented horticultural farming.
SHEP in Africa originated in Kenya and is now being implemented in 28 countries on the continent. Speaking during a
ZIM-SHEP sensitisation workshop in Gwanda on Wednesday, Department of Agricultural Technical and Extension Services chief horticulture specialist in the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development, Mr Assah Mudhefi, said the project will run concurrently in Matabeleland North and South provinces until 2025 but would not be drawn to reveal the budget. He, however, said six irrigation schemes in the two provinces are being targeted under the project.
“The programme has now moved to Matabeleland South and North Provinces, and at the moment we are holding sensitisation workshops with the technical staff,” he said. “We have managed to train farmers in the other six districts and the irrigation schemes are doing well. Under ZIM-SHEP we are training farmers around the country on how to venture into market-oriented agriculture.
“We are saying the farmer should grow to sell. At the moment farmers are mainly growing perishable commodities such as tomatoes but they don’t have the market. By the time they are supposed to sell they mix selling and marketing but these two are different. Farmers have to identify the market first before they get into production,” he said.
Mr Mudhefi said farmers will be trained on how to do market research while being encouraged to grow different varieties of crops based on market demands.
He said quantities that farmers will produce and frequency of delivery will be set before production stage. Mr Mudhefi said small-holder farmers were losing a lot of money to middle men that were linking them with markets instead of directly contacting with markets.
Mr Mudhefi said all irrigation schemes in Matabeleland were expected to adopt this approach in order to ensure that Vision 2030 is achieved.
“Three irrigation schemes will be identified in Matabeleland South and three in Matabeleland North where a hands-on training of technical staff and farmers will be conducted,” he said.
“At the end of the cycle we expect the Agritex provincial staff, district staff, and extension officers to replicate this model in other irrigation schemes throughout the whole province so that by 2030 every farmer will be market-oriented and growing to sell.”
Mr Mudhefi said a number of agricultural officers and specialists from various provinces have been trained in Japan under the ZIM-SHEP project.
Matabeleland South provincial economic development officer, Mr Richmond Ncube, said this project was crucial in alleviating poverty and ensuring food and nutrition security in the province. He said a lot of farmers were losing their horticulture produce after failing to sell it on time because of market challenges.
Mr Ncube said irrigation schemes were a crucial part of the province’s agricultural sector as it was a dry region. The agricultural sector contributes 17 percent to the country’s Gross Domestic Product and 40 percent of export earnings with horticulture being the fifth largest agricultural export earner contributing 6,8 percent.
ZIM-SHEP is one of the partner projects defined in the Horticulture Recovery and Growth Plan, which is a major milestone towards the implementation of the Agriculture and Food Systems in Zimbabwe.
A significant portion of horticultural crops is produced by smallholder farmers with major challenges affecting farmers mainly being low productivity, limited access to markets, and inability to market produce profitably, among others.
Sidumisile Mabena