Climate Smart Agriculture in Zambia Impact Evaluation

The Climate Smart Agriculture in Zambia (CSAZ) programme will utilise up to £25 million of UK International Climate Fund resources between 2016 and 2020. The CSAZ is implemented by the Conservation Farming Unit (CFU). This evaluation will assess the CSAZ programme to determine its impact on resilience, increased income, food security and social benefits at household level. The evaluation will be implemented by a WYG-led consortium contracted through the DFID Global Evaluation Framework Agreement (GEFA). The consortium consists of the UK-based LTSI International (LTSI), the Zambian Indaba Agricultural Policy Research Institute (IAPRI), and the US-based Cloudburst Consulting Group. The evaluation has a dual accountability and learning purpose. The majority of the evaluation team’s effort will be directed to learning about the programme’s impacts, with additional evaluation questions helping to contextualise the findings and to generate lessons learned for future implementation design. The headline evaluation questions are as follows: 1. Was the design of CSAZ relevant given its objectives? 2. How efficient and effective is the CFU’s implementation of the Climate Smart Agriculture programme? 3. Do CFU activities improve the incomes, food and nutrition security of smallholder farmers through the promotion of conservation tillage and conservation farming? 4. To what extent is support for CSA from CFU and the private sector institutionally sustainable? Climate Smart Agriculture can incorporate a wide range of practices, incorporating agronomy, soil and water conservation, livestock management and agro-forestry. In the case of CSAZ, the focus is on conservation farming, which is based on three key principles: (i) minimal soil disturbance through minimum tillage , (ii) protecting the top soil with organic soil cover/crop residues and (iii) crop rotation with legumes. CSAZ provides training on conservation farming principles and promotes the adoption of minimum tillage via three different options, namely hoe/basin farming , ripping using animal draught power and mechanised ripping using tractors. CFU promotes the adoption of conservation farming by recruiting a network of Farmer Coordinators (FCs) which offer training to a group of up to 90 farmers per FC each year. This training covers the principles of conservation farming along with information about other good agricultural practices. At the start of the programme, there were 1, 690 Farmer Coordinators from CFU’s previous work. Since July 2016, the programme has recruited a further 1 010 FCs, bringing the total to 2,700. According to data provided by CFU Staff, Farmer Coordinators cover 36 Districts. As part of the CFU exit strategy, qualified Farmer Coordinators will provide CFU-supported training for two years before transitioning to a fully private-sector model where FCs act as community agro-dealers offering farming advice in order to increase sales of equipment and inputs. As a result, CFU is actively collaborating with a range of private sector partners to explore opportunities to attract ongoing private finance in support of its extension network. CFU also facilitates training for tillage service providers, including linking potential ripping service providers to banks for loans to purchase tractors and other equipment. A programme of research activities also aims to collect evidence on soil and yield changes from 93 trial plots across the CFU operational area.