Integrating crops and livestock for improved food security and livelihoods in rural Zimbabwe

The overall goal of the project is to identify, test and prove ways to increase agricultural production, improve household food security, and alleviate poverty, thereby reducing food-aid dependency in rural Zimbabwe through better-integrated crop and livestock production and market participation. The project’s research will also test ways to improve linkages amongst market chain actors that allow smallholder enterprises to actually exploit these.

It integrates a participatory technology development framework (including baseline diagnostics, stakeholder workshops, systems simulation modelling, technology screening, on-farm trials and demonstrations) with value chain analyses (market options and performance) that feed into multistakeholder platforms for knowledge exchange thereby linking to effective impact pathways.