Care International

CARE International has been working closely with COMACO, specifically in Chama District of Eastern Zambia.  Major goals in line with the MDG’s that COMACO and CARE together strive to address include eradicating extreme poverty and hunger; promotion of gender equality and women participation and to ensure environmental sustainability by integrating the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes and reverse the loss of environmental resources.

Support from CARE has gone into mobilizing and recruiting  a total of 6,178 registered farmers of which 3,821 are female and 2,357 are male.  This number is growing annually at about 10-15% with new farmers joining the programme.  These farmers are distributed across 5 chiefdoms of Chama, namely Tembwe, Kambombo, Chimphamba, Kanyerere and Muyombe in Isoka and are engaged in various livelihood skills. The farmers are grouped into Producer groups depending on the activity they are involved in, and manage to sell their surplus to COMACO through 5 trading depots situated in the different chiefdoms. The commodities, mostly rice, groundnuts, maize, and honey, are then transported to the larger trading centre situated in Chama urban for value-added processing and are sold under the brand name, It’s Wild!

Other activities the farmers are involved in include fish farming, beekeeping, poultry rearing, goat rearing and vegetable farming. The producer groups have been supported with starter inputs through CARE funding to enable them improve their livelihoods.
CARE has been a useful partner to WCS and has helped advance the business model further by ensuring that Chama Trading centre reaches a productive stage.

Stories from Chama

“COMACO transformed me from killing animals to keeping animals”

Abnala Mughandila is a tall, strong man with a hearty laugh and a huge smile; it’s rare that he’s not grinning. Abnala is 52-years-old, with three wives and 17 children; 13 boys and four girls, six of whom are still in secondary school. He’s a COMACO lead farmer who lives in Muyombe, 160 kilometers north of Chama in the Northern Province. It’s a typical family for the region where some men have 10 wives, but it’s difficult for many to feed and send their children to school. Abnala’s two oldest sons didn’t finish school because he couldn’t afford it.

Before he joined COMACO Abnala made his living by poaching and traditional farming; it was how he fed his family. He also had some cattle which he kept and sold during rough times. At the time, it was a struggle for the whole community which relied primarily on poaching.

He joined COMACO in 2007. He didn’t have many other skills by which to make a living. Back in the .... read more

Coping with climate change

Charity Goma is a shy woman, but has a warm smile and a wise, thoughtful demeanor. Her biggest priority is good education for her five children. Charity lives in a village near Kambombo, about 20 kilometers from Chama in the Eastern Province. She is 42-years-old and widowed. Her husband, who was a farmer, died in 2003. And like her husband, she farmed rice and cotton, but it wasn’t enough to keep all her children in school. “The weather isn’t as predictable as it once was; floods and droughts have become much more devastating and harder to predict”, notes Charity.

Things changed when she joined COMACO in 2008, and she’s learned how to cope even during periods of climatic shock. Charity currently plants rice, maize, cotton, ground nuts and sorghum, but her best yields come from rice. COMACO taught her how to ...... read more



It started with rice …

July 2010 -- Deyo Zimba is determined that his children will have a better life. Deyo is 42-years-old and lives about 40 kilometers from Chama in Mahobe village near Tembwe with his wife Florence and their six children. He’s a rice farmer and a general store owner. The store is well-stocked and orderly, rows of chitenge materials hanging neatly from the ceiling and food stuffs align the shelves in tidy rows. Florence is a shy but proud woman. She tends to their one-year-old son Joshua while Deyo speaks to us. They are devoutly religious couple and keep a bible on the store counter. They feel blessed by God for COMACO, because their family is faring better than many in his community.

Deyo joined COMACO in 2003. That first year, he got a seed rice loan from COMACO and planted two limas (0.25 hectares) of rice. Since that time, he’s learned a great deal about conservation agriculture techniques, such as digging basins and planting before the rain, and his yields have slowly increased.
After struggling for years, the real change came in 2009.  “It started with rice,” says Deyo. That season he ..... read more