30th September 2023
In Autumn 2023, the EU funded LEG4DEV project was invited by the Zambian Ministry of Agriculture to provide training supports to a National Training of Trainers (ToT) Workshop for a total of 60 (50 male and 10 female) Zambia provincial agricultural officers for scaling Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA). Dr. John Recha (ILRI) from the LEG4DEV project attended the workshop as a facilitator and trainer of 60 (50 male and 10 female) Zambia provincial agricultural officers for scaling climate smart agriculture. The training workshop was convened by the Indaba Agricultural Policy Research Institute (IAPRI). The national CSA manual and training guideline were developed through a participatory process that involved partnership by the Ministry of Agriculture with national and international stakeholders, including the World Bank in Africa and Global Center on Adaptation to support the Zambia Growth Opportunities (ZAMGRO) strategic programme of 2022- 2026. The ZAMGRO development objective is to promote diversification, sustainability, and jobs in the agri-food sector of Zambia by reaching at least 800,000 smallholder farmers by end of 2026.
The World Bank support through Zambia Growth Opportunities (ZAMGRO) is nested in the key elements of the Eight National Development Plan (8NDP) and Zambia Vision 2030 through the strategic areas of the Second National Agriculture Policy (2NAP) and its Third Policy Implementation Plan (3PIP). ZAMGRO was designed to focus on the crop sub-sector which receives approximately 90% of the agriculture sector funding but has major policy distortions, and institutional and service delivery inefficiencies. The ZAMGRO programme’s objective is to scale-up climate-smart agriculture, while also ensuring support to move towards more adequate agriculture sector expenditure framework, targeting 20% (circa 800,000) of the smallholder farmers, out of the four million smallholders registered in the Zambia Integrated Agriculture Management Information System (ZIAMIS).
Following the training of 60 Provincial level Agricultural Coordinators and subject matter agricultural extension experts from the 10-provinces, they in turn train the District Agricultural Coordinators and subject matter experts across the 116 districts in the country. I.e.,
- Central Province (11 districts)
- Copperbelt Province (10 districts)
- Eastern Province (15 districts)
- Luapula Province (12 districts)
- Lusaka Province (6 districts)
- Muchinga Province (8 districts)
- Northern Province (12 districts)
- North-Western Province (11 districts)
- Southern Province (15 districts)
- Western Province (16 districts)
The government’s District-level experts in turn train the agricultural extension officers from the sub level 469 agricultural blocks who will ultimately train the frontline agricultural extension officers from the 2620 agricultural camps that cover the entire country of Zambia. This strategy will help to reach the target smallholder farmers in the current 2022-2026 phase of scaling Climate–Smart Agriculture, including training of farmers for the scaling of legumes for CSA outcomes across the 24 Activity Areas of the LEG4DEV project.
