Region category: Southern Africa

Technology might change agricultural practices in Zimbabwe for good, once COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns have ended. This emerged when a women’s entrepreneurial training program was almost derailed because stakeholders couldn’t do required site visits on farms due to stringent lockdown rules. Drone technology came to the rescue, doing the work faster and more efficiently than otherwise would have been possible with human visits.

Fifteen women farmers have been selected to take part in the Food for Export Masterclass 2020 (FEM2020): a program that seeks to build the capacity of female entrepreneurs in various aspects of horticulture, dairy production, food processing and food export business with a view to turning them into successful exporters.

More than 6,000 jobs are on the line in the horticulture sector amid calls for the government to intervene and support farming which, like other sectors of the economy, has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.

A new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) for the general agriculture sector has been signed even before the minimum wages of the last one have been implemented turning the whole process into a circus.

Lockdown measures imposed as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic are putting women at heightened risk of gender-based violence (GBV) at home and cutting them off from essential protection services and social networks. This was revealed in a Hivos-commissioned survey by Labour and Economic Development Research Institute of Zimbabwe (LEDRIZ) titled Impact of Covid-19 on the Horticulture Sector in Zimbabwe. The survey was conducted in May 2020.