More water, renewed hope
Badre Bahaji – UN World Food Programme
Marita Tangata and her family live in a drought prone area in Nsanje district where they hardly harvested enough food for the year. In 2016, she relied on humanitarian aid to feed her family.
Since 2017, WFP has been working with smallholder farmers including Marita to build their resilience against climate shocks. Thanks to a solar-powered irrigation scheme, Marita and other families are able to grow onions, vegetables, pumpkins and eggplants.
“In total, I invested 31,000 Malawi Kwacha in seeds and equipment. After two seasons, I made more than 500,000 Malawi Kwacha from sales of veggies”. Today she is a successful farmer able to bring diverse food to her home and make money.
She has built a new house with corrugated iron sheet roofing (left in the picture above) and can now pay fees for her children in secondary school and buy books for them.
Suleyman Mussa was only relying on rain-fed agriculture and with erratic weather, his crop yield had always been unreliable. Most of the time he would rely on casual labour to put food on the table.
Thanks to the sales made in Tapumuluka irrigation scheme, Suleyman has bought a bicycle to ease transport and iron sheets to roof his house.
Thanks to the support of USAID Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance (USAID BHA), WFP is supporting 85,000 food-insecure households in the districts of Balaka, Chikwawa, Machinga, Mangochi, Nsanje, Phalombe, and Zomba through the construction and rehabilitation of assets that strengthen their resilience to climatic shocks. USAID-BHA has been supporting WFP’s Food Assistance for Assets (FFA) programme since 2017. The programme enables farming communities to create productive community assets, such as fish farming ponds, micro-irrigation schemes, and flood-control dykes, among others, while they receive cash transfers to cover immediate food needs.
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