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Zimbabwe Farmers Union’s Young Farmers’ Innovation Lab Programme has continued scoring successes in Honde Valley with two groups of youths now supplying dried bananas to supermarkets around Mutare. The project which started in June 2015 is being funded by United Nations Development Programme and accommodates ZFU active farmers aged between 18 and 35 years.
Honde young farmers are now supplying large quantities of dried bananas to Spar Supermarket and Farm and City Shop.
The Young Farmers’ Innovation Lab Programme is also being rolled out in Mashonaland East.
It was introduced mainly to strengthen entrepreneurship among young farmers in Zimbabwe according to the 2013-2017 Zimbabwe Agriculture Investment Plan which emphasises on the need to “facilitate a sustainable increase in production, productivity and competitiveness of Zimbabwean agriculture through building capacity of farmers and institutions, improving the quantity and quality of public, private and development partner investment and alignment”.
However, ZFU facilitated the installation of four driers at Mapungwana and Mutarazi irrigation schemes as well as Gatsi and Hauna business centres in Honde Valley for the two groups.
It also managed to source partners like University of Zimbabwe, Africa University and Harare Institute of Technology to work with the young farmers.
UZ and AU are now bringing in their students for industrial attachments, helping the young farmers to do their projects, while HIT is designing applications that farmers can use in their daily farming activities.
“We want to make agriculture attractive to young farmers through technology. Now farmers are able to do record keeping for their products on cellphones through applications being designed by HIT,” said ZFU Manicaland provincial manager, Mr Lloyd Mataya.
He added that despite a few challenges that the young farmers had been facing during the production of their products, the project had to a larger extent been successful.
“The young farmers faced inputs, water, registration with the Ministry of Health and Child Care and market penetration challenges, but all these have been rectified. They are now at a level where they can continue with the projects on their own even if UNDP and ZFU leave,” said Mr Mataya.
In an interview, Young Farmers’ Innovation Lab Programme chairperson, Mr David Rori, said the banana project was a success and they were now working towards producing dried mango and vegetable products.
“The banana project has been successful and this year we are targeting to produce dried mango and vegetable products since we managed to get a greenhouse from Mutasa North Member of National Assembly, Cde Luke Masamvu in November last year.
“Our project has also managed to attract Barclays Bank which is helping us with financial management knowledge and this is surely a game changer to our lives,” he said.
Online Reporter