Technical Assistance to Support the Performance Enhancement Programme for Better Service Delivery to Farmers

Given that about 80% of the population depends on agriculture as their main source of livelihood, the agricultural sector has the greatest potential to significantly impact the Government’s poverty reduction aspirations and to achieve increased economic diversification.

The proposed project aims at addressing some of the identified challenges.

• Limited technical capacity: There are a number of Agricultural Training Institutions under the auspices of the Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock that offer different types of training. There has been no systematic upgrading of the curricula of these institutions to meet the current demands of the sector and little attention has been paid to institutional management and training methodology.
• Ineffective Human Resources (HR) management: Challenges persist including the low quality of human capital due to insufficient staff skills development (see above), inadequate recruitment (only about half of existing positions are effectively filled) and a lack of incentives. This results in demotivation and high staff turnover. Weak synergies between departments lead to poor coordination and delayed collective action.
• Weak extension services: The provision of agricultural extension services represents the critical front line output of the two Ministries. For example, for Agriculture Camps, the extension officer to farmer ratio in Zambia was found to be 1:900 in 2011, which falls short of the recommended level of 1:400. This situation is further aggravated by outdated technical knowledge among Camp extension officers and insufficient requisite equipment needed to go into the field to conduct trials and demonstrations with farmers. Moreover, extension cannot function properly without a continuous flow of appropriate innovations that requires strong linkages with research.
• Inadequate contribution and dissemination of research: Despite wide recognition of the importance of investing in research to increase crop productivity, prevent and control diseases or to strengthen resilience to climatic variability and climatic change, spending on agricultural research has experienced a downward trend for the past decades. As a result, a number of government research programmes are no longer being carried out due to a lack of adequate resources and trained personnel.
• Weak monitoring, evaluation and information management systems: The Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) has an Early Warning Unit, which generates quality statistics on crop production and input utilisation by the farmers through the Crop Forecast and Post-harvest Surveys. The Unit has limited capacity to analyse and interpret statistics and lacks a comprehensive sectoral monitoring and evaluation (M&E) approach.
• Underdeveloped nutrition mainstreaming capacity: Although Zambia is seen as having "medium" nutrition governance (WHO 2009), it has very high stunting levels of children and the highest prevalence of undernourishment in Africa.

The overall objective of the project “Performance Enhancement Programme for the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock for Better Service Delivery to Farmers” (PEP II) is “to support the Government of Zambia's policy objective to reduce rural poverty and enhance food and nutrition security”.