Zimbabwe secures $242 million from EU and FAO to bolster agriculture
The Government of Zimbabwe has secured USD242 million from the European Union (EU) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO to support the agriculture sector. Out of this amount, the EU has committed $140 million while the Food and Agriculture Organization has committed $102 Million.
The funding will support priority areas such as increased productivity through improved natural resource management, international and domestic market development, Food and Nutrition Security. Others are gender sensitive agricultural research and coordination, as well as monitoring and evaluation.
Domestic and international private sector, cooperating partners such as the EU pledged to support sustainable land and water management, value chain development, trade capacity and business development, resilience and climate change, food and nutrition security and quick response and early warning systems.
The FAO will support policy and institutional frameworks, competitiveness of the agricultural sector and resilience and climate smart agriculture.
The Zimbabwean Government has since committed to incrementally fund the sector to achieve 10% target as per the CAADP to leverage more investment resources. The country’s Investment Plan is aimed at strengthening agriculture input and output markets which is key to Zimbabwe’s fight against poverty through agricultural-led development.
Addressing the delegates, Assistant Secretary General in Charge of programmes, Ambassador Kipyego Cheluget said Zimbabwe was the 13th COMESA Member State to host the Post-Compact High Level Business Meeting within the CAADP framework.
He said the High-Level Business Meeting is an additional resource mobilization platform to enable financing of the Zimbabwe Agriculture Investment Plan (ZAIP).
“This is a crucial milestone to ensure the CAADP agenda moves beyond documents into full scale implementation of programmes,” Ambassador Cheluget said.
He noted that the ZAIP was developed consultatively in accordance with CAADP principles and congratulated Zimbabwe for championing the process and achieving such remarkable milestones.
COMESA’s support to Zimbabwe’s High Level Business Meeting was a collaborative effort from the Division of Industry and Agriculture’s CAADP unit and the Zimbabwe Regional Integration Implementation Project, supported by the Regional Integration Support Mechanism (RISM) through funding with the European Union (EU).
