Chiundura women embrace value  addition and beneficiation Women at the beneficiation centre milling their maize
Women at the beneficiation centre milling their maize

Women at the beneficiation centre milling their maize

Lovemore Zigara
RURAL women in Chiundura in the Midlands have taken the economic blue-print, Zim-Asset concept of value addition to heart and it is working positively for them.

At a time when most rural communities have raised a red flag for government food aid following successive years of drought, 42 women from Chiundura’s Ward 10 under Chief Gambiza, are actually value adding and beneficiating produce from their plot for urban markets.

A member of the centre, Rhoda Sibanda, 53, who is a widow and grandmother, is taking care of a number of orphaned children left by her deceased children, thanks to her plot and the value addition project.

She is also managing to send them to school through proceeds from the beneficiation and value addition centre.

“I’m a widow. My husband passed away in 2010 and the situation worsened when two of my children also passed away forcing me to take responsibility for them.

“Before I joined this project, my grandchildren would be chased away from school for non-payment of school fees and some were malnourished because of the poor diet. But today everything has changed for the better, thanks to this value addition centre. I can afford all the basics I need including sending my grandchildren to school,” Sibanda told the Chronicle.

The 42-women cooperative sits on a two-acre plot under irrigation that is jointly owned by the members.

Each member of the group grows her own produce at the irrigation scheme. Their produce, mainly vegetables that include rape, covo, carrots, tomatoes and onions as well as sunflowers and groundnuts, have a ready market in Kwekwe and Gweru. All members supplement the irrigated crop with produce from their individual communal fields to boost their business.

Sibanda said no produce is taken to the market in its raw state.

“All our produce is taken to the Value Addition and Beneficiation Centre first where it is processed before being dispatched to urban markets. Our lives have greatly improved ever since the irrigation and value addition centre opened,” said Sibanda.

What is sent to the market from the centre are dried vegetables, cooking oil, peanut butter and stock feed, among other things.

Today Sibanda is the proud owner of a well-furnished house, thanks to the value addition centre.

The centre was set up after a women’s group, Women and Land, working with its partners, Rural Women Assembly, Women Coalition of Zimbabwe and the Norwegian People’s Aid, secured funds for the project.

For ready cash, the women run a village bank where members have a dual role of being proprietors and clients.

“We contribute varying amounts towards the ‘bank’ before borrowing from the same fund. We borrow small amounts ranging from $20 to $100 to help us sustain our families. The money is returned with interest,” Sibanda said.

When the news crew visited Chiundura, the all-women’s place was a hive of activity.

Additional evidence that the Chiundura Value Addition and Beneficiation Centre is a successful model in changing the fortunes of rural communities is provided by Naume Matonga, another beneficiary.

Matonga has managed to buy two head of cattle and household property through proceeds from the value addition and beneficiation centre.

“It’s indeed an economically empowering project. Unlike in the past where we used to sell maize and groundnuts which didn’t fetch much on the market, we now sell pre-packs of maize meal, cooking oil and peanut butter. We sell our products at competitive prices so as to outshine established shops. However, we’re realising much more than we used to get in the past before value adding,” she claimed.

Matonga said the women have secured a big order from a supermarket in Gweru for the supply of 1,000 packets of dried vegetables every week.

“This translates to $1,000 a week for us from the dried vegetables alone. Through such initiatives I’ve managed to buy my own property as a woman including two head of cattle. I bought the beasts last year and I want to buy one more before end of the year as well as household property,” explained Matonga.

For an area that has been known for poor rains, reduced yields and hunger, the women’s Value Addition and Beneficiation Centre has indeed improved the community’s food security and economy.

By-products from the value addition machines such as sunflower cake are being fed to breeding chickens commonly known as “road runners.” The road runners have a ready market at hotels and restaurants in cities.

Provincial Development Officer for Midlands in the Ministry of Women, Gender and Community Development, Sithembile Dube, is credited by the women as the brains behind the success of the project. She endorsed the value addition and beneficiation centre concept as a model that can be employed in other rural areas.

“Our long term plans as a ministry are to make sure that women get bigger pieces of land for the market gardening project. Chiundura is a drought prone area and even the soils aren’t so good. We’re thinking, if the women get a bigger piece of land for irrigation, then they can grow a variety of crops at a higher scale and make more money.

“This means the money will circulate in Chiundura and the people are economically empowered. Most of the people in the rural areas are the women and initiatives like these should be encouraged everywhere because they empower the rural woman,” said Dube.

She said to the 42-women group, government food aid could turn out to be a bonus to them, once it reaches Chiundura.

The country is faced with a grain deficit of 700,000 tonnes after receiving below average rainfall in last year’s summer cropping season. The government has already started addressing the deficit through importation of grain from various countries. The successive droughts precipitated by global warming and climate change effects, have driven the government to take a deliberate approach of investing in irrigation schemes to counter the changing weather patterns.

Local traditional leader, Chief Gambiza, implored the government and its partners to take the value addition and beneficiation centre concept to all wards in Chiundura.

“The project has the capacity to ensure food security in all households once taken to all the wards. It’ll also improve the livelihoods of marginalised rural communities, especially women who are naturally economically disadvantaged,” he said.

The developments in Chiundura are espoused in the government’s economic blueprint, Zim-Asset.

ZimAsset seeks to “build a prosperous, diverse and competitive food security and nutrition sector that contributes significantly to national development through the provision of an enabling environment for sustainable economic empowerment and social transformation.”

It also advocates for value addition and beneficiation so that individuals and the nation can maximise returns on resources.

Women and Land Programmes coordinator, Norman Munikwa, said the promotion of a value addition and beneficiation centre is a way of empowering women to enable them to be financially and economically independent.

“We’ve realised that women bear the brunt of poverty and if you look at the statistics, 68 percent of women headed households in Zimbabwe live under the Total Consumption Poverty Line according to a 2010 UNDP Report and as a way of improving their social standing, we came up with the irrigation project and the value addition centres.

“We’re now promoting value addition agriculture where we’re saying on the pieces of land they should practise product beneficiation and value addition in Chiundura. There is an oil pressing machine, a grinding mill and a solar drier so that they can value-add their produce to cooking oil, peanut butter, dried vegetables (umfushwa) and mealie-meal which fetch more on the market,” he said.

Through value addition and beneficiation, women in Chiundura have managed to secure their own assets, a herculean task previously limited to men.

The empowering of women is explicitly highlighted in the new constitution under the Bill of Rights which recognises that men and women have a right to equal treatment, including a right “to equal opportunities in political, economic, cultural and social spheres.”

The economic benefits for women in Chiundura, Munikwa noted, fits into the country’s gender policy which encourages the creation of informal income generating projects for women.

However, more still needs to be done to involve more women to increase their participation in economic forums at local and national level which should be a pedestal to the development of rural areas.

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