Zimbabwe makes strides in El Nino response and recovery

Masvingo – With the El Nino induced drought already declared a state of disaster by many countries in Southern Africa, Zimbabwe is making significant progress in developing and implementing drought mitigation strategies to combat the impacts of this drought.

Through the United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is leading implementation of the project entitled: Mitigating the Impact of El Nino-induced Drought (MIEND) in Zimbabwe. The goal of this project is to reduce the impact of the drought in the most affected districts in the country. To achieve this goal, interventions of the project are focused on access to survival stock feed, improved access to water for livestock and increased awareness by communities on drought mitigation strategies.

Last week, FAO Anticipatory Action team together with the Government of Zimbabwe through the Department of Civil Protection embarked on a mission in the Bikita district of Masvingo province to interact with communities and households benefitting from the MIEND project interventions. The objective of the mission was to gather their feedback and perceptions on the implementation of anticipatory actions in this drought.

The mission was also aimed at learning from community experiences to support the development and implementation of context-specific and timely interventions, and at leveraging community voices and perspectives with views to inform and advocate on the benefits of systematic community engagement in Anticipatory Action.

“Implementation of the MIEND project is anchored on community engagement in Anticipatory Action. The FAO Anticipatory Action team had the opportunity to appreciate realistic experiences of communities to document and inform programming that will respond to build resilience of the communities most affected by El Nino in Zimbabwe and hopefully other member states that FAO serves in this region,” said Patrice Talla, FAO Subregional Coordinator for Southern Africa and Representative to Zimbabwe.

For FAO, community engagement allows to systematically inform, consult, involve and collaborate with people and communities who are at risk, to empower and support them in building their own resilience to shocks. These interventions are aligned to the national Drought Risk Management Strategy 2017-2025 and with FAO’s Anticipatory Action and Response Plan, which is anchored on mitigating the expected impacts of El Nino-induced climate extremes on agriculture and food security.

With support from the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance of the United States Agency for International Development, the Community Engagement in Anticipatory Action project is also implemented in Bangladesh, Guatemala and the Niger, and aims to identify and disseminate good and promising practices and provide normative and practical guidance and tools to facilitate a more inclusive and bottom-up approach to Anticipatory Action programming.

Building resilience through community engagement and Anticipatory Action

The FAO Anticipatory Action team in liaison with the inter-Ministerial Department of the Civil Protection Committee coordinated the learning field mission with the objective to conduct interviews with different stakeholders. The initial process involved interviews to understand specifically the perspectives of women and youth groups on the impacts of the MIEND project and hear about their short to longer-term needs, vision, hopes that will make them more resilient to drought and other co-related risks.

The mission then focused on getting the perspectives of the local leadership with the objective to blend the findings to develop context specific interventions.

"A person dies at the point where their livestock die," said a man at a Focus Group Discussion as he emphasized the central role played by livestock in farmers’ livelihoods.

There was a consensus that the project is meeting the needs of the communities while acknowledging that more could be achieved through such routine consultations through community engagement, such as leveraging local knowledge and capacities into AA systems.

Going forward, FAO will document findings from the learning mission to inform future Anticipatory Action programming. With an acknowledgement that the La Nina is now imminent, these findings will also inform resource mobilization to respond to La Nina in the coming 2024/25 farming season.