Location: Tete, Manica and Zambézia provinces
Duration: 2013-2022
Donor: Norwegian Embassy in Maputo
Focus areas: Land tenure; functional adult education; conservation agriculture and sustainable land use practices; access to input and off-take markets, including last mile inputs distribution; rural entrepreneurism; Information Communication Technology (ICT)

Mozambican smallholders are some of the most climate vulnerable in the world, and Mozambique ranks the fifth country most affected by climate change.  Fifty years ago, the country was hit by a cyclone around once a decade – more recently, this has risen to three per decade, with the country battered by four cyclones in the last three years alone (and cyclone intensity is increasing too). Added to this, in recent years rural families have faced multiple other shocks including COVID-19, commodity price volatility, a violent insurgency rapidly spreading in the northern provinces and, now, the knock-on effects of supply chain crisis provoked by the war in Ukraine.

For the last decade our Norwegian Embassy funded PROMAC I and its follow-on PROMAC II programs have supported over 62,000 farmers in the central provinces to mitigate these and other risks. PROMAC is the country’s leading program promoting conservation agriculture practices as a means of weathering climate shocks, increasing smallholder income and food security, and promoting more sustainable agricultural practices that ensure the fertility of their land for future generations. PROMAC combines this with functional adult education, improved nutrition, access to input  and off-take markets, and support to obtain legal land tenure (in turn, increasing farmers’ long turn, sustainable investments in their land).

Selected results to date:

• Adoption of conservation agriculture techniques and technologies: over 62,000 small scale farmers (around 51% women) adopted conservation agriculture practices
• Production, productivity and food security: Farmers have increased their yields by 60% – 215%. Households’ maize stocks have increased from 8 to 13 months – five extra months of food security
• Access to yield enhancing technologies: PROMAC’s network of mechanical rippers (a minimum tillage alternative to the traditional plow) has enabled 293 farmers to prepare 768 hectares of land using conservation agriculture
• Land tenure: 4,417 households obtained legal land title (or DUATs), 39% in women’s name and 14% in co-ownership regime, securing 21,510 hectares of land
• Access to output markets: PROMAC supported farmer groups traded 34,694 tons of surplus commodities, worth $12,105,000
• Access to input markets: PROMAC’s network of 360 last mile entrepreneurs sold 1,694 tons of improved inputs in their communities, at full retail cost (no subsidy), worth $2,315,000
• Uptake of certified inputs: PROMAC’s own input voucher subsidy, the Green Discounts, supports conservation agriculture adopters to experiment with the full conservation agriculture package (seeds, fertilizer, pesticides and mechanical land preparation). 1,417 farmers accessed over 213 tons of subsidized improved inputs through the Green Discounts
• Functional adult literacy: 16,085 farmers, who had no previous experience with numeracy and literacy, graduated from grade three – making them eligible to enroll in grade six of the National Education System