Farm Talk Radio Educates Farmers in Zambia

In the past year, our Zambian partner COMACO, has increased its farmer membership from 140,000 to 167,000 small-scale farmers in Eastern Zambia. Farmers then participate in cooperatives, which is the future of small-scale farming. We’re delighted that our Prime radios and Lifeplayer MP3s continue to be used to help to educate and inform farmers in partnership with them.

It is imperative that COMACO develops trust and loyalty with its member farmers by providing high-quality extension services that build self-reliance.  Their hands-on approach encourages local farmer cooperatives to take on greater responsibility, which in turn, offer possibilities for increased income generation from crops they can sell. 

Here’s how it works:

Lead farmers are organised into three levels:  group, senior and principal.  Lead farmers support a year-round training and farmer compliance to a farm calendar of recommended practices for COMACO-registered farmers.  This allows COMACO to improve adoption rates of best practice farming approaches on a large scale for increased yields, crop diversification, and more efficient aggregation of crops to facilitate markets. For farmers to further progress from one level to another, formal courses are loaded onto the Lifeplayer and certificates are distributed upon the successful completion of examinations. The Lifeplayer enables students to listen to lessons more than once if necessary. This is particularly important since many farmers might never have attended school. Our Lifeplayers also support areas and those cooperative which don’t receive a radio signal.

COMACO Farm Talk airs three times a week on Breeze FM to more 1.2 million listeners in the local language, Nyanja, in the Eastern Province and over the border into Malawi.   These one-hour programmes motivate, inspire and educate farmers by listening to their peers on what they have learned and achieved and to technical experts who explain the information in terms that farmers can understand.  At least three thousand listening groups are using our Prime radios to ensure access.

This is one of our all-time favorite projects. As COMACO grows, so do the number of farmer cooperatives we’re able to support with information access!