Assessment of climate resilience options to improve the livelihoods of female headed households
Context
Climate change has severely impacted Zimbabwe’s agricultural productivity and livelihoods through erratic rainfall patterns, prolonged droughts, rising temperatures, and increased pest and disease incidences. Traditional crops like maize face significant negative effects, with recent studies showing climate-related crop failures of up to 70% in marginal farming areas. These challenges disproportionately affect women and children in rural areas, who lead agricultural activities and provide food for families while running local economies.
Women face heightened vulnerability due to structural barriers in accessing decision-making processes, land tenure, and climate finance for adaptation and resilience building. Despite Zimbabwe’s ambitious climate resilience policies, implementation faces structural challenges, creating urgent need for community and private sector involvement in climate-resilient agriculture.
This Technical Assistance addresses this by upgrading cassava, mango, and egg value chains to improve livelihoods and nutrition for female-headed households, aligning with the National Horticultural Plan and addressing three UNFCCC Gender Action Plan priorities: Capacity Building to engage in direct communication with female farmers to identify root causes of challenges, providing training on Climate Smart Agriculture, value chain development, and best practices through community workshops; Gender Balance and Leadership to target female-headed households and smallholder farmers with minimum 60% women participation in trainings, equipping them for leadership roles in sustainable agricultural practices and advocacy and Gender Responsive Implementation that engages female-led cooperatives and farmer associations in gathering ground-level information, crafting recommendations, and ensuring ownership of interventions through culturally sensitive, gender-disaggregated approaches that promote women’s leadership in future agricultural initiatives.
Goal
The overall goal of this initiative is to evaluate on-and off-farm climate resilience opportunities for upgrading cassava, mango, and egg value chains to enhance the livelihoods and nutrition of rural households in Zimbabwe, especially female farmers and female-headed households, who currently depend on highly vulnerable, rain-fed maize production.
CAA Technical Assistance
The technical assistance aims to identify major climate risks within the value chain, roles of private and public actors, opportunities for agroprocessing, and market trends. It also assesses the environment’s capacity to address climate challenges and enhance post-harvest practices in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland East, Mashonaland West, and Midlands provinces. The objective is to demonstrate the implementation of Climate Smart Agriculture in the cassava, mango, and egg production value chains. This project will employ two primary data collection methods: reviewing existing documents, conducting key informant interviews, and hosting focus group discussions. Three workshops will be held to validate results and increase capacity. The final products will be three gender-sensitive, climate-smart value chain reports for Mango, Cassava, and Egg sectors.
Key Activities:
- Stakeholder Mapping: Identification of key value chain actors for interviews and data collection
- Value Chain Assessments: One-day national stakeholder meeting will be scheduled, followed by field visits to all three provinces
- District-Level Training: Workshops for female-headed households and female smallholder farmers will be conducted on focusing on Climate Smart Agriculture practices, policy information, and advocacy approaches. This will be followed by three workshops to validate findings and enhance stakeholder capacities.
- National Workshop: One-day dissemination event presenting findings with emphasis on market-based solutions for enhanced female participation
