RIU Zambia's works on exit strategy for Conservation Agriculture programme with contractors and agro dealers
3 August 2011

Tweet   

RIU Zambia was funded from 2006-2011. Recently the RIU Zambia team has been working on an exit strategy for it groundbreaking Conservation Agriculture programme.

For the past couple of years RIU Zambia has been working on a range of Conservation Agriculture initiatives in four districts in the eastern and southern provinces.

As the current round of DFID investment has come to an end, the country team is now looking at exit strategies. The RIU Zambia team has embarked on process of linking many of the 110 Conservation Agriculture service providers with the agro-dealers in those districts in order to strengthen the input supply chain. The RIU team hope that this will sustain the Conservation Agriculture work they initiated, notably provision of ripping and herbicide spraying (weed control) services to small-scale farmers, rather than them relying on traditional ploughing methods.

The plan is that the service providers, who have already had capacity building support from RIU, work with a cluster of farmers and so they are able to establish and aggregate demand for seed, fertilizers and herbicides the farmers require. This therefore presents an additional business opportunity for the Conservation Agriculture service providers to act as commission agents for agro-dealers. Currently agro-dealerships are mostly located in town centres, often many kilometers away from where the inputs are needed.

Victor Makasa, Country Coordinator RIU Zambia, said:

"We realized that it was important for conservation agriculture service providers and farmers to have a stable source of rippers, ripper chisels, chains, sprayers and other accessories, but also basic inputs such as seeds and fertilizers.

With more farmers using Conservation Agriculture and applying it to bigger fields, more inputs will be required. So, for the service providers to improve and sustain their businesses there must be a corresponding improvement in the supply. We also think that it is important that these supplies are available locally to the service providers and the farmers they serve.

So far round 20 agro-dealers have expressed interest in working with Conservation Agriculture service providers on an agency basis. However, they have expressed a need for some capacity building of both for themselves and the service providers to make the new arrangements work.

We think we have a model for Conservation Agriculture which can be replicated elsewhere"

See also how the mechanization platform was mainstreamed by RIU Tanzania.