adminMonalisa Chikwengo
SOME 109 898 smallholder farming households in Manicaland that were affected by Cyclone Idai are now self-reliant following an intervention by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) through establishment of nutritional gardens and rehabilitation of dip tanks.
The community had been relying on humanitarian assistance before the intervention.
This was said by Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) sub-regional co-ordinator and country representative for Zimbabwe, Dr Patrice Talla recently at a two-day learning event and sharing lessons learnt held in Nyanga.
The learning event ran under the theme ‘Building Resilience and Transforming Agri-Food Systems in the Face of Climate Change.’
The event saw 150 local and regional stakeholders and strategic partner institutions working on agri-food systems and climate change, environment and water and market actors converging.
“The intention of FAO’s interventions was to support affected households to not only recover and rebuild, but seamlessly transition from humanitarian to development,” said Dr Talla.
Dr Talla said the Zimbabwe Idai Recovery Programme (ZIRP) interventions did not only build back better but also spoke to Government’s thrust and investment into sustainable agriculture as articulated in the Agriculture Food Systems Transformation Strategy document.
The project established 64 community gardens and rehabilitated 55 dip-tanks in Manicaland.
All construction will help restore livestock and crop production and productivity for improved livelihoods.
“Four of the gardens have been installed with environmentally friendly solar powered systems to reduce the drudgery of manual watering. Ideally, we should have solarised all the gardens, but the model is there for the Government to scale up,” said Dr Talla.
The impetus of the FAO interventions in the ZIRP project was to support households to not only recover from the shock of losing homesteads, crops, livestock and agricultural infrastructure, but to rebuild their capacity to plan and adapt to climatic shocks.
Farmers received appropriate training on small livestock production, and good animal husbandry practices to ensure proper handling and management of the livestock.
A total of 549 410 people in Chimanimani, Chipinge, Buhera, Masvingo and Mutare districts benefitted from the training.
Households were given agricultural inputs to restore lost crop production using drought tolerant seeds for maize, cowpea, sorghum, basal fertiliser and top-dressing fertiliser.
The FAO under the ZIRP funded by the World Bank under United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) provided humanitarian support to smallholder farming households in Manicaland to counter the devastating effects Cyclone Idai under the Idai Recovery Project
ZIRP restored livestock production for the affected smallholder farmers by restocking small livestock (poultry and goats), provision of supplementary stock feed, fodder production, vaccinations, dipping and deworming.
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