Increasing Climate Resilience in Energy & Agriculture Systems and Entrepreneurship
Zambia,
ongoing
The INCREASE project works to improve the social, economic and environmental resilience and equity in agriculture and energy systems, through strengthening the adaptive capacity of agricultural and energy systems.
Do you know what happens when integrated soil fertility management is combined with agro-forestry, bio-slurry, renewable energy and irrigation? You have more climate-friendly, stable and higher yields. This is what Sida’s INCREASE (Increasing Climate Resilience in Energy & Agriculture Systems and Entrepreneurship) project is all about.
The INCREASE project has evolved from both lessons learned and achievements in two earlier Sida-funded climate-smart agriculture and renewable energy projects SILMS (Sustainable Integrated Land Management Solutions) and E4A (Energy for Agriculture).
The overall objective is to increase the social, economic and environmental resilience and equity in agriculture and energy systems, through strengthening the adaptive capacity of agricultural and energy systems. The project will be implemented over the course of three years from January 2020 to 31 December 2022. It will cover Eastern, Central, Copper belt, Lusaka and Southern provinces, initially targeting 11,300 smallholder farmers.
SILMS was essentially tasked to promote climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practices in two districts in the Eastern Province targeting over 20,000 smallholder farmers. E4A focussed on securing household energy for cooking and fertiliser needs and aimed to install 4,575 biodigesters. These two projects under SNV, have individually offered convincing evidence of the various aspects that contribute to resilience. Bringing the achievements of the projects together will expedite the foundations for sustainable farming and value chains.
Biogas and bio-slurry are more relevant than ever for diversification of sustainable energy options and conservation type farming. They have enormous growth potential in Zambia as hydro-carbons are being phased out, alternatives to wood fuel become more pressing and the agricultural sector is moving away from chemicals and more towards organic farming. The project working hypothesis is that:
SNV's main partners in the project are the Zambia Agriculture Research Institute (ZARI), and three agribusinesses, each with a large smallholder farmer base: Alliance Gineries Limited (cotton), Parmalat (dairy) and Freshmark (horticulture).
