Chipo sentimentally remembers the bountifully surplus that she used to sell in the past for an income while the remainder would last her until the next harvest. With unpredictable weather patterns now dominating the agricultural seasons in Masvingo and the rest of the country at large, Chipo has been food insecure in the past five years.
“Every agricultural season now it’s a struggle for survival. The rains are no longer falling as they used to. Drier periods are now longer. The rains are coming late and when they do, it is usually excessive making it very difficult to harvest anything tangible. We now rely more on food handouts than our own food production,” says Chipo.
Due to frequent droughts, pest infestation and the adverse effects of weather patterns such as El Niño and La Niña, farmers are finding it very difficult to survive through rain fed agriculture. The dry spells in particular have been devastating.
For the first time this year Chipo has insured her crops, through Old Mutual – one of the largest insurance and financial services companies in Zimbabwe who are one of the partners working with the World Food Programme’s (WFP) implemented R4 Rural Resilience Initiative in Masvingo District.
Supported financially by the Government of Switzerland through the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the programme is a multi-partner initiative and plans are afoot to extend it to the dry district of Rushinga in Mashonaland East province.
The R4 initiative promotes four risk management strategies, namely risk reduction (asset creation), risk transfer (weather-indexed micro-insurance), risk taking (credit) and risk reserves (savings). In Zimbabwe, the programme is planning to introduce a fifth element on climate services. The primary objective of the programme is to help poor households improve their food security and deal with climate shocks such as drought.
The initiative in Masvingo is targeting 6,000 households for the next three years and has so far insured about 500 farmers against drought during the 2018/19 agriculture season. A further 4,000 households will be targeted in Rushinga district. Under asset creation component, farmers work on activities such as construction of small dams, marker ridges, rehabilitation of fish ponds, and road works.
The greatest innovations under the R4 initiative is that poor smallholder farmers pay for insurance through their labour on productive assets in their communities.
The insurance is index based, meaning satellites are used to monitor rainfall and pay-outs are triggered automatically if rainfall is below pre-agreed amounts.
“When drought hits, all my hard work goes to waste. This is why when I heard about this weather-related insurance, I did not hesitate to participate in the community work that was required,” said Peter Mayera, aged 77 from Chebvute Village.
“Taking into consideration that agricultural weather-based index insurance is relatively new among our smallholder farmers, there is a need for strong financial education,” Justice Nduna from Old Mutual said. “When small-scale farmers are financially literate, they are able to guide fellow farmers to uptake a particular financial product such as insurance or credit … and avoid making poor decisions.”
For the first time, Chebvute community members are able to explain what index agriculture is about and how they will be paid in the event of poor rains.
Apart from insuring their crops, this year, the Chebvute community is working with CIMMYT to adopt conservation agriculture. Through conservation agriculture, farmers are hoping to retain adequate moisture through compost manure, compare conversation and conventional agriculture and other techniques that they have been taught.
Through the savings and lending component of the programme implemented by SNV, members from Chebvute Village are participating in village savings and lending groups. Although having started only just a few months ago, some of the farmers have managed to save some money and are buying and selling groceries in the community. Some are also using the money for emergencies including school fees and medical costs.
Despite it being in the preliminarily stages of implementation in Masvingo, the comprehensive risk management approach in the R4 initiative is already showing great promise in helping vulnerable rural farmers to increase their food and income security in the face of increasing climate risks and shocks in Zimbabwe.
