Poor Zambia Farmers Learn Success From Peers

By Michael Hill

Sheseke, a small town in remote western Zambia, dusty by day, dark at night, would seem like the end of the earth to most people. But Peter Phiri finds it a little too urban.

It's not that Phiri, 38, who works for Catholic Relief Services' partner Caritas, grew up in the African bush. He's from Livingstone, one of Zambia's bigger cities, on the border with Zimbabwe where the Zambezi River spills into a narrow canyon to create Victoria Falls.

But until last year, the Caritas headquarters for this area was far north of Sheseke—in the remote Shangombo province. Electricity came from solar panels on the roof of Phiri's primitive office facilities. There was no indoor plumbing. Bath water came from the Zambezi River. Lions frequented the area. The occasional elephant wandered through.

Phiri spent four years living in Shangombo, working with residents of the small villages that dotted the bush. Some were a full day's drive over nonexistent roads in the heartiest of four-wheel-drive vehicles. Shangombo is one of the poorest areas of this poor country. "I loved it," Phiri says of his time there.

"Poverty was in your face every day. That was the way to experience it. When we would have meetings, people would want to go to big cities and stay in nice hotels and talk about poverty. I would say, no, come to Shangombo and experience it."

Shangombo was in the midst of a terrible drought when Phiri went there. He helped get people emergency food aid through CRS. Eventually it became clear that while such aid would alleviate their hunger, it would do nothing about their poverty.

So the programs began to change. Instead of just getting food, villagers got seeds and help from agricultural experts. They began growing crops. Some did well. Many did not.

It turned out that there was a better way to spread the knowledge of how to make crops grow than having some expert lecture the locals. Phiri used a technique called "positive deviance" to get the fledgling farmers learning from each other.

Success Teaching Success

The technique was first used by development agencies looking into child health. If all families in a village were getting the same food, but the kids in one family were much healthier, then aid workers would get the villagers together to talk with the mother of the more successful family, to learn what she was doing to benefit her children.

Phiri began looking for successful farmers in Shangombo, getting them together with those who were struggling. The farmers would share problems and solutions. Soon, many of the farms were flourishing.

In this area of dire poverty, Phiri says, several of the farmers sold enough of their excess crop to buy three treadle pumps, foot-operated devices that lift water from the Zambezi River onto their fields, further increasing their yield—and their profits.

Now that he is living in Sheseke, Phiri is trying to create more such success stories. He drives into the small settlement of Reaserch, a collection of thatched huts on hardscrabble land near the mighty Zambezi, downstream from Sheseke.

"There used to be 188 families on targeted food assistance here. Now there are 33," Phiri says with some pride. "And those are only the extremely vulnerable, like families of 'double orphans,' where both parents have died, usually from AIDS."

A short drive later, the reason for that progress is clear. Amid the brown dirt and scrubby trees, behind a fence constructed of natural vegetation, through a gate of stacked-up branches and logs, suddenly there appear row after row of green vegetables—cabbage and onions and okra and tomatoes and various spinach-like greens—in carefully tended terraced beds. This would be a beautiful garden anywhere. It is stunning here in the Zambian bush, growing from the dusty, brown earth.

CRS-supported programs provided the seeds for this and several other gardens that villagers planted along the banks of the Zambezi. This one belongs to Kubby Mukena. The 48-year-old uses the produce to feed and support his wife and seven children.

Caritas agricultural officer Angela Mwale wanders amid the rows of plants, giving approving comments on Kubby's efforts.

Water for irrigating the garden comes from the Zambezi, carried up the slope in buckets and poured onto the raised beds. "It is difficult when the children are in school," Kubby says, explaining that then he has to do all that work himself. "It would be good to have a pump."

Putting Floodwater to Work

Though there are hardly any navigable tracks through the bush near the gardens, the community is not far from the paved road that connects Livingstone and Sheseke. Its location is important to the project, whose goals include turning subsistence farmers into commercial farmers, getting some of their goods to city markets and beginning to grow wealth in these communities.

Far from the Zambezi along a dusty, bumpy road is the village of Limpumpu. Its crops were destroyed by floods that devastated the area in early 2008. The extent of the damage can still be seen along the roadway—parts of it washed out when what are now completely dry, flat stretches were carrying raging waters. Detours into the bush are still required months later.

Phiri has farmers in the area using what the floodwaters left behind—large ponds and pools of water—to irrigate vegetable gardens. He put the positive deviance approach in place, using successful farmers to teach those who are struggling how to make use of the water in this sandy soil. He can recite statistics similar to those in Reaserch about the reduction in families on food assistance.

But today, Phiri is not thinking about vegetables; his mind is on another foodstuff—meat. The village has spent several days building an elevated cage, surrounded by a small corral, getting ready to receive a shipment of goats.

This area is not without livestock—plenty of cattle roam through the bush. But the cattle don't contribute to the nutrition of the people here for one simple reason: "They won't slaughter and eat the cows," Phiri explains.

In these traditional villages, cattle represent wealth. They are money in the bank. They are a payment for a bride. They are not food.

"But they will eat goats," Phiri says.

That will add much-needed protein to their diet.

But there is more to the program than food. This delivery of goats is not destined for the slaughterhouse. Their job is to produce more goats—as well as milk.

The 30 goats that were taken off a truck and put in the enclosure—elevated so their manure could be more easily recovered for fertilizer—were all female. Two male goats were to be delivered in a few days. One duty of those looking after the goats is to ensure that there is no mating between these females and the handful of local goats that wander the area. That's because this is also a breeding operation, designed to improve the stock of goats in the village.

Once they have a better breed of goats, the villagers, Phiri hopes, will not only milk some and eat some, they will also sell some, for meat and milk and breeding in other villages. That way, this program produces not just food, but wealth, perhaps the most elusive crop in these parts of Zambia.

Michael Hill is CRS' communications officer for sub-Saharan Africa. He is based at the agency's headquarters in Baltimore.