Working with communities and the land in Zimbabwe

The image above shows members of the Mu-uyu Baobab Women’s Agroecological community garden. © Zimbabwe Women’s Association

Ronika Mumbire stands under a blue sky looking out over rows of green crops on a plot of land in Mutoko, a mountainous, semi-arid region in the east of Zimbabwe. Vegetables, beans, and green mealies – a maize which does well in this climate – are all growing here, in the Mu-uyu Baobab Women’s Agroecological Garden.

Ronika is the executive director of the Zimbabwe Women’s Bureau, a not-for-profit organisation that provides rural women farmers with training in conservation agricultural practices, as well as business entrepreneurship and livelihood support. The Zimbabwe Women’s Bureau also provides women with financial and material support to get them started in their businesses. Currently, the team at Zimbabwe Women’s Bureau are training 36 women farmers in agroecology, which includes farming practices such as crop rotation, composting, and mulching. The trainings have also helped the women to claim their rights to land resources. Access to land is key for rural women to be able to practise agroecology.

The official opening ceremony for the Mu-uyu Baobab Women’s Agroecological community garden was held in October 2024, and participants were already selling crops harvested from the land at local markets by November. Rosemary Chiripanyanga is the Chairperson of the Mu-uyu Agroecological Garden. Preparing the land for planting was hard work, but the women worked together to ready the soil. “We are looking forward to a prosperous future,” says Rosemary, “where we can sustain our livelihoods, including affording school fees for our children.”

The Zimbabwe Women’s Bureau launched the Mu-uyu Baobab Women’s Agroecological community garden. Ronika believes the garden is an opportunity for growth and change. “It will transform the lives of the local women,” she says.

Implemented at scale, regenerative agriculture practices such as this one in the Mu-uyu Baobab Women’s Agroecological Garden have huge potential to regenerate degraded croplands, leading to improved food security and biodiversity conservation.

In another corner of Zimbabwe, this model is being implemented on a larger scale. In the arid southeast Lowveld region of the country lies the Malipati farming community, a remote, hot, place in the extreme south of the Gonarezhou National Park. As in Mutoko, most people living in Malipati eat what they can hunt or grow, which varies year-on-year. Farmers in Malipati practise dryland slash-and-burn rain-fed agriculture, and this has led to massive soil and landscape degradation. Climate change has led to changes in weather patterns that negatively impact rainfed agriculture. Community reliance on rain-fed agriculture means that annual crop failures are becoming the norm – resulting in chronic food insecurity and malnutrition.

Sustainable Agricultural Technology’s Wildlife and Livelihoods Development (SATWILD) programme empowers local communities to become active conservation partners. SATWILD does this by first supporting communities to address food insecurity.

“We recognise the need for food security, and that the lack thereof is driving greater environmental degradation and deforestation. This is threatening whole communities. That is why we are investing in basic livelihood solutions.”Chap Masterson, technical coordinator of SATWILD.

To this end, SATWILD has constructed an integrated Agriculture hub (Agri-hub), which includes a 36-hectare solar-powered irrigation scheme. This will benefit 9,500 smallholder farmers. By adopting agroecological farming practices supported by the Agri-hub, farmers are now growing enough food on much less land, allowing 25,000 hectares of degraded cropland to recover. The Malipati Agri-hub also supports innovative solutions for enhanced food security and climate resilience at the household level, while supporting the restoration of degraded agricultural land, rivers, wetlands, and catchments.

The restored croplands will help re-establish important wildlife corridors and reduce human and wildlife conflicts, which occur when wild animals destroy crops or kill livestock. These conflicts are quite common in Malipati.

The Agri-hub will improve food security, increase local employment opportunities, and improve community wellbeing overall.

SATWILD uses a participatory approach to working with communities. “What we have focused on over the last ten to twelve years is engaging with communities, getting to understand them, and working with them to try to identify good solutions and sustainable future trajectories,” says Chap. “We have also rejuvenated grazing for their livestock, which is one of the most important assets, from both an economic and cultural point of view.”

In another effort to develop and scale natural resources conservation efforts, in 2023 and 2024 Gonarezhou and Akagera National Parks hosted The Effective Conservation Training Initiative in Zimbabwe and Rwanda, respectively. This is a field-based two-week-long training initiative for potential team leaders working in conservation that takes place every year, though in different parks. The course allows participants the chance to directly engage with and learn from veteran conservationists from around the world. Participants also learn from each other and share their own experiences and challenges.

“The idea was to combine experience and human resources, identify people working in conservation projects, and train them to the next level to become effective conservation leaders who can manage complex problems and human teams.”Ignacio Jiménez, coordinator of the Effective Conservation Training Initiative.

This ongoing training programme aims to increase the number of conservation leaders managing complex programmes and multidisciplinary teams in conservation landscapes around the world. Leading conservation organisations working on different continents share their practical knowledge with each other, train and inspire their staff, and assess and identify potential recruits capable of managing some of their programmes and teams in the field. Participants came from Africa, South America, Australia, and Germany. This diversity of experience enriches the learning, where participants and local community members alike can share what they know works, and bring what they learn back to their respective countries.

“What we are doing is the equivalent of sending lots of seeds to different continents, from which I think some of the best conservation programmes are going to flow in the future,” says Ignacio.

Ian Munyankindi, who has been working for the not-for-profit African Parks since 2012, took part in the training. About the course, he says, “It’s helped me to get all the tools that I needed to be a very good leader and to be successful in my conservation career for myself, and for our world.”

This work falls under the Regenerative Landscapes Sub-programme of our Environment Programme, which envisions a world in which degraded landscapes and ecosystems are restored for the benefit of both people and wildlife. See our Environment Programme website to learn more about this work.

And, watch the video below to learn more about the Zimbabwe Women’s Bureau: