News: IDE Zambia Wins Top Honours

Copperbelt Ag Shows Recognize Organization's Work

LUSAKA - IDE Zambia has won first prize at the Kitwe Agricultural Show and second prize at the Ndola show. The awards provide welcome exposure for IDE’s Rural Prosperity Initiative, which launched in Copperbelt in mid 2008 and has so far linked over 1,400 farmers to commercial market opportunities.

Project manager Aggie Chama says that many people at the shows this year were encouraged to see the potential for earning an income from small-scale agriculture at a time when the Copperbelt has been hit with massive layoffs in the mining sector due to the global economic recession and low copper prices. “It gives hope to retired miners to realize that there are other sources of income that are sustainable.”

The shows gave IDE the opportunity to promote the Rural Prosperity Initiative with over 60 farming groups and cooperatives and to speak with over 2,000 individual farmers. Attendees at the show were interested in the opportunities to sell Michigan beans to Freshpikt cannery and to purchase affordable irrigation equipment and agricultural inputs from Cropserve and Mineland input suppliers.

With the generous support of a group of BC donors, IDE Zambia’s Rural Prosperity Initiative has been active in Copperbelt since July 2008. So far, it has formed 37 marketing groups that comprise over 1,400 farmers. By 2011, the initiative aims to have increased the income of 3,500 farmers by at least $250.