Webinar series Recap for the Webinar Held on 30th January, 2024.

The Southern Africa Accelerated Innovation Delivery Initiative (AID-I), MasAgro Africa Rapid Delivery Hub project holds webinar series that feature selected partners to present their activities and emerging lessons on the project implementation.
This series featured Munyaradzi Junia Mutenja an Economist International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in Zambia and Jeremiah Sigale, Technical Lead at World Vegetable Centre (WVC) in Tanzania.
Mutenja presented “Innovations to support irrigation, climate smart agriculture and aquaculture among smallholders and medium enterprises”. Mutenja shared how acceleration of the bundled climate smart information services and climate smart technologies were being implemented through partnerships. The objective of the intervention was to strengthen inclusive climate smart innovations and last mile delivery system through food systems and strengthen sustainable extension advisory services. The overall lessons learnt during implementation included the importance of bundling partners and building climate smart agriculture and climate information services innovations, using participatory design to strengthen partnerships and collaborations with key stakeholders both private and public sectors.
The second presentation by Jeremiah focused on “Innovations for Scaling up Health Diet Seed Kits for Household Nutrition and Food Security”. Jeremiah gave an overview of the food security situation in Zanzibar highlighting that 8% of Zanzibarians face food security challenges and 34% need livelihood support. Additionally, 18% percent of school going children are stunted and 18% are underweight. The statistics were attributed to low consumption of nutritious vegetables.
To help address these challenges, WVC was implementing an innovation of distributing health kits that enables communities to grow their own food, increase availability and accessibility of nutrient rich vegetable seeds. The key indigenous vegetables in the kits are African eggplant, Amaranth, African Nightshade and Cowpea. WVC has distributed diet kits to 3,500 households and 40 schools, benefiting 17,500 individuals.
The innovation has benefited areas with high malnutrition rates and has promoted increased consumption of diverse nutrient rich vegetables, helped communities grow own varieties and decreased reliance on external sources. Major challenges encountered during implementation of the innovation included limited access to resources and cultural and traditional practices. To mitigate these challenges WVC has embarked on ongoing training on the production of quality seed, and continuously raising nutrition awareness.
January 30, 2024