Piloting incentive-based agricultural portfolios for nutrition and resilience in Zambia

Food tree and crop portfolios for nutrition and resilience in Zambia

Ways you can support the project

Diets in rural Zambia are low in micronutrients essential for growth and well-being. But “food trees” can provide some of these much-needed micronutrients in their fruit, nuts, leaves and other edible parts, that can be consumed as part of diverse diet.

Our Project

Our project aims to bring nutrition and resilience to farming families in Zambia. By growing portfolios of diverse fruit (“food”) trees including cultivated and wild fruits, integrated with existing systems of vegetables, pulses, staple crops, smallholders can improve their health, livelihoods, and their environment. The portfolio approach aims to minimise seasonal hunger and nutrient gaps and diversify smallholder diets and income opportunities in Zambia. The portfolios provide an example of how agriculture may be used to promote nutritionally rich diets, particularly for rural smallholders who rely predominantly on food from their own farms.

We are developing and rolling out portfolios of micronutrient-providing trees (and other complementary crops) to a targeted 10,000 households. The project is operating in three provinces in Zambia – Eastern, Muchinga, and Central.

The project comprises six interconnected components, the first four are knowledge based activities, which involve generating evidence for adapting and contextualising the food tree – crop portfolio innovation, and two outreach activities which lay the foundations for scaling.

Component 1. Evaluating food tree – crop portfolio adoption in Kenya using a nuanced adoption gradient to evaluate uptake of the technology to inform further piloting in Zambia.

Component 2. Customising nutritious food tree – crop portfolios for three localities in Zambia which will address seasonal food and nutritional gaps in local diets.

Component 3. Validating and refining food tree – crop portfolios through farm system analyses and understanding farmer aspirations, including gender and youth considerations.

Component 4. Laying the foundations for adoption and exploring market opportunities and value chain interventions for priority food tree – crop portfolio produce.

Component 5. Creating a conducive scaling environment through enhancing seed system infrastructure via tree resource and delivery centres for quality seed and seedling production (motherblocks for priority species established), 60 on-farm demonstration plots established, and food tree – crop portfolios piloted across 10000 farms.

Component 6. Strengthening extension actor and smallholder farmer capacities, with at least 100 NARS, development organisation and private sector extension actors trained on food tree – crop portfolio establishment and management and developing and disseminating three tailored communication products to at least 10000 smallholder farmers.