Empower refugees in Zimbabwe to plant 50,000 trees

In Tongogara Refugee Settlement, Zimbabwe, Refugee Coalition for Climate Action (RCCA) has transformed land that used to receive solid waste from the local market as a dumping site into a community garden run by RCCA that now fills the refugee market with fresh vegetables and other crops like groundnuts.

The project started in October 2025 and is still running, and it is run by 10 RCCA team members, including 5 girls and 5 men, who work together to cultivate vegetables and manage the community garden.

The refugee-led organization team members learned this organic agroforestry initiative and put it into practice on the ground. In a very organic way, the members started cultivating vegetables such as okra, carrots, onions, tomato, green pepper and chilli pepper, garlic sombe, pumkin, sweet potatoes, and crop like groundnuts and other leafy greens alongside fruit trees.

The garden currently covers 0.5 hectare. The team members have now grown more than what they can eat at the household level and have begun selling the surplus, and more than 20 households benefit every week from access to fresh vegetables. This project complements household nutrition and opens opportunities for youth engagement in sustainable food production.

Young people like Jeannine Dukundimana own a small vegetable garden at RCCA's nursery site, where she grows eggplants and okra, and this is where her family gets fresh vegetables.

RCCA members’ long-term vision is to expand the nursery site into an hectare and scale up vegetable production so they can become a key supplier of fresh vegetables in the refugee community, where fresh vegetables typically disappear after the rainy season due to limited access to water for community backyard gardeners growing them.

Links:

• Jeannine Picking some vegetables