I welcome you to Issue 11 of our newsletter – Talking Goats and Pigs. We celebrate four years of programming under the European Union funded Zimbabwe Agricultural Growth Programme striving to leave a mark on the goat and pig value chains.
This issue coincides with Women’s Month whose theme this year was DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality. I am proud that our interventions position women as key participants and decision makers across the board.
In this offering, we feature powerful stories of women’s contributions and work in transforming the goat and pork value chains in twenty districts of Zimbabwe.
Our thrust remains the commercialisation of small and medium scale producers through well thought out market-based interventions and co-created solutions.
Cognisant of the bottlenecks that still remain in the path of commercialisation for small and medium producers, the project planned and undertook capacity building workshops for the twelve Goat Producer Business Associations and two pig producers business syndicates with the aim of improving service delivery and organisational efficiencies. The first phase of the exercise resulted in the development of comprehensive plans, service targets and results monitoring frameworks.
I am happy that through the direct meat marketing initiative, the project continues to support farmers to supply high rewarding urban markets of Harare and Bulawayo with goat meat and meat products. We also feature the findings of an assessment we undertook together with the Pig Industry Board into the efficacy of Artificial Insemination in pig production. The assessment came on the back of the long running semen campaign implemented to enhance uptake of superior genetics by small and medium scale farmers.
I invite you to delve into our latest news edition as we share success stories, key project updates and much more.
Happy reading