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WFP Zambia Country Brief, July 2022

Attachments

In Numbers

7.65 mt food assistance distributed

US$ 123,211 cash-based transfers made

US$ 1.4 million six-month (August 2022 – January 2023) net funding requirements

107,037 people assisted in July 2022

Operational Updates

In July, WFP assisted 107,037 beneficiaries through its package of interventions. The assisted populations included 18,298 refugees and asylum seekers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) reached through cash and food assistance; 44,761 beneficiaries under nutrition support interventions; 31,471 smallholder farmers through resilience interventions; and 12,507 people through social protection activities.

Nutrition promotion

In collaboration with the Ministry of Health, the National Food and Nutrition Commission and the media, WFP continued to promote good nutrition practices through the Healthy Diets Campaign, reaching 5,757 school children (53.2 percent girls) in 17 schools in Mazabuka and Mumbwa districts through school-based engagements. The Healthy Diets Campaign is a nationwide health and nutrition promotion programme designed to help consumers make better food choices and stimulate demand for nutritious food.

WFP continued to promote availability of nutritious foods at household level by strengthening the capacities of smallholder farmers, mostly women, in post-harvest management and food processing and preservation. During the month, WFP concluded the training of 822 beneficiaries (82 percent women) in post-harvest management and food processing and preservation in Chinsali District. The trainings are enabling families to adopt good crop management, storage and preservation practices, allowing them to have increased access to safe and quality food for consumption and a marketable surplus for sale to earn an income.

As part of ongoing efforts to decentralise the implementation of nutrition improvement interventions, WFP and partners facilitated the formation of three ward nutrition coordinating committees (WNCCs) in Mazabuka. This was in addition to the 11 WNCCs created in the district previously. The WNCCs will be overseeing the implementation of nutrition promotion activities at ward level under the SUN II programme.

Smallholder support

Market systems approach continues to gain interest as a viable mechanism for enhancing smallholder farmers’ access to predictable markets to improve their incomes. During the month, WFP, at the request of the Ministry of Agriculture, conducted a training of trainers for 12 (4 female) agri-business staff from the ministry drawn from selected districts and HQ on the approach, equipping them with skills to enhance smallholder farmers’ access to markets via a 3-tiered commodity aggregation model. The trained staff will in turn train other ministry specialists in all the ten provinces as part of national efforts to facilitate countrywide adoption of this model. The commodity aggregation model promotes input and output market linkages between smallholder farmers and buyers, with the following three categories of actors: micro aggregators (mainly lead farmers); intermediary aggregators (agro-dealers, cooperatives and traders); and off-takers (large-scale buyers/processors).

Social protection

WFP continued to provide technical support to the Ministry of Education to strengthen the capacity of district education offices in the local procurement of food for school feeding under the national Home-Grown School Meals (HGSM) programme. In July, WFP supported the orientation of 30 procurement staff from 15 districts on the procurement guidelines and procedures to ensure a harmonized procurement process that enables timely delivery of commodities to schools. In addition, WFP concluded the mapping of local aggregators/farmer cooperatives to be linked to the HGSM programme to supply food commodities; this followed the disbursement of a sum equivalent to USD 1 million to the districts by the Government to buy food commodities for the first and second school terms of 2022.

Following the successful installation of 71 hydroponics gardens in 70 schools across 16 districts with WFP support, the Ministry of Education is exploring opportunities to expand school gardening to enhance horticultural production and diversify school diets. As part of these expansion plans, WFP and the Ministry finalized an implementation plan to establish more school gardens using low-cost locally available technologies. For a start, the low-cost school gardens will be piloted in three schools across three districts before gradually scaling up based on the lessons learnt and best practices. Besides enhancing vegetable production, the gardens will enable schools to transfer agricultural skills to school children.