Helping Zimbabwe's Women Farmers

After two years, a project to aid poor, women farmers funded by the British embassy and managed by Development Aid From People to People, or DAPP, a non-governmental aid group, is bearing fruit, according to an article by Jennifer Dube in The Standard, a Zimbabwean newspaper.

Dube spoke to a Tina Zambezi, a widowed farmer in the village of Shamva. Zambezi, age 45, has six children.

"Life has changed for the better for us," Zambezi told Dube. "All I need to be part of the project is my energy and will, yet the gains are many and they range from food, money, medicine and even expertise."

The project is a good example of how a relatively small input of money can bring enormous change to people's lives.

Starting with the equivalent of $20,000 in 2007, the embassy paid for "water tanks, gardening equipment, fencing materials and start-up seeds for the projects." Dube writes that "Zambezi is one of 150 women in Shamva and Bindura districts of Mashonaland Central who benefited from 10 nutritional farming projects jointly supported by the embassy and DAPP."

In the case of Zambezi, she and 11 other villagers — "five women and six orphaned children" — bought a small plot of land. They formed a group under a regional farm co-operative to practice modern, rotational farming on their plot, which, according to Dube, had been given up as useless by other co-op members.

"DAPP extension officers taught us rotational farming so in the last season, we had maize in this field," Zambezi told Dube. "We use the produce to feed our families and we sell the excess. Last season we bought a goat with the money we made. We have paid tuition fees for some orphans from our community and we also assist elderly people who can no longer work for themselves."

Tim Cole, who is the Deputy British Ambassador to Zimbabwe, estimates that in 2009 the British embassy will invest an estimated half a million U.S. dollars in Zimbabwe, including projects having to do with "health, clean water, food, HIV and AIDS, education and displaced persons."

Photo courtesy of Radio Nederland Wereidomroep, via Flickr