Enhancing agro-ecological production and productivity in the Mtwara region

Enhancing agro-ecological production and productivity in the Mtwara region

Introduction

TABIO is among the partners of the project on Enhancing agro-ecological production and productivity in the Mtwara region. Building on its experience with past SWISSAID interventions in the Mtwara regions, this projects aimed to further support over the period 2016-2020 a community of around 6000 small holder farmers through ecological agriculture in the four districts of Masasi, Masasi town, Nanyumbu and Mtwara rural. With a specific objective to help small holder farmers increase their levels of ecological agriculture production and productivity, this project contributed to reaching the Swissaid Country programme

This project was implemented by Swissaid in collaboration with:

• Tanzania Organic Agriculture Movement (TOAM)
• Sustainable Agriculture Tanzania (SAT) – New partner
• Tanzania Alliance for Biodiversity (TABIO)
• WS Technology Consulting – New Partner
• A gender consultant, Elizabeth Waithanji (Phd) – New Partner
• Local farmers organisations with which it has already collaborated, including NADEFO, UMIKA, KIMAS, MAWODEA, MAFAMA, MABAMA, SHAKAM and MSOAPO.

Outcome 1: Improved sustainable livelihood of smallholder farmers, with a particular focus on poor farmers, women and youth. The key indicator to assess the extent to which the project achieve its objective was the output per land unit where diversified agro-ecology is applied. This project was implemented in close synergy with other Swissaid projects focusing on marketing and value addition, and institutional strengthening of farmers’ umbrella organisations. Its core activities (and related outputs) consisted in:

• Designing and implementing trainings around ecological agriculture (number of animators trained; replication rate among farmers)
• Providing technical backstopping (number of farmer groups visited at least once / twice/ three times or more by a trainer in a given period)
• Support learning visits to Sustainable Agriculture Tanzania (SAT) for groups of animators (number and percentage of animators who visited SAT; percentage of animators who confirmed an increased commitment to agro-ecology after visiting SAT; percentage of farmers who confirmed an increased commitment to agro-ecology after feedback from their animators who visited SAT
• Creating an ICT platform (Macho Sauti – MS) to support and disseminate agro-ecological best practices (number of animators who have a smartphone and can use the MS application; number of issues raised through MS; percentage of total issues raised responded to; percentage of responses found useful and applied by the farmers)
• Establishing a repository of good agro-ecological practices and training material, including video tutorials, possibly combined with MS (number of postings and material saved on the repository; number of postings and material used from the repository; number of stakeholders accessing the repository, in particular farmers; qualitative feedback from users)
• Supporting incentives for animators and farmers (number of farmers receiving a prize for best agro-ecological performance; number of farmers supported to attend Nane Nane or another agri-fair; percentage of farmers incentivized by reward structure).

In this project, TABIO focused more on providing backstopping for farmers groups which were producing quality declared seeds and those which were selecting and saving their seed from one season to the next.