US$130 Million Zambezi Resilience Plan Shifts To Delivery
The Zambezi basin’s future was spread out on maps and spreadsheets in a Harare conference room as delegates from eight countries argued over priorities. Outside, the early September heat carried a familiar warning: the river they share is becoming harder to predict.
By the time the workshop closed on 11 September, Angola, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe had agreed on the first set of priority actions for a US$130 million regional effort to protect food systems, livelihoods and ecosystems along the Zambezi. The Programme for Building Resilience of Food, Livelihoods and Ecosystems in the Zambezi River Basin – BREFOLE‑ZRB – is now edging from design to delivery.
Few rivers carry as much of a region’s fortunes as the Zambezi. It drains one of Africa’s largest basins, powers Kariba and Cahora Bassa, irrigates farms, feeds fisheries, draws tourists to Victoria Falls and supplies drinking water to millions. That dependence is also a fragility. When drought sets in, turbines slow and crops shrivel. When floods come, they wash away fields and homes. Climate change is sharpening both extremes, even as more families turn to the river for survival.
Who Is Behind The Zambezi Resilience Programme?
The three‑day Harare workshop brought together the Zambezi Watercourse Commission (ZAMCOM), the African Development Bank (AfDB), the Global Mechanism of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and the Government of Zimbabwe as conveners.
Around them sat UNCCD National Focal Points from across the Southern African Development Community (SADC), river basin organisations, dam operators along the Zambezi, regional technical partners, civil society organisations and private sector representatives.
FFA Explainer:
UNCCD National Focal Points are national officials who coordinate each country’s response to land degradation and drought. They serve as the bridge between local projects and global finance and policy under the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.
Participants worked through BREFOLE‑ZRB’s technical designs, funding allocations, implementation arrangements, geographic targeting and environmental and social safeguards. They also reviewed how the programme lines up with national development priorities, the Strategic Plan for the Zambezi Watercourse (ZSP 2018–2040) and the Southern Africa Great Green Wall Initiative.
For Zimbabwe, the discussion links directly to the National Development Strategy 1 (NDS1), which places agriculture, water security and climate resilience at the heart of economic recovery and inclusive growth.
What Will The US$130 Million Fund Actually Support?
BREFOLE‑ZRB carries a financing package of around US$130 million, drawing support from sources such as the Climate Investment Funds, the AfDB, the African Development Fund and the Global Environment Facility.
The programme rests on four main components:
- Natural resources management – restoring degraded landscapes and improving water management across the basin.
- Community climate resilience – promoting climate‑smart agriculture, stronger value chains and economic opportunities for women and youth.
- Institutional capacity and knowledge – building skills and systems to plan, implement and monitor interventions.
- Coordination – keeping eight national efforts pulling in one direction to achieve basin‑wide results.
FFA Explainer:
Climate‑smart agriculture is a set of farming practices that raise productivity while helping farmers adapt to changing weather and, where possible, reduce emissions. It includes drought‑tolerant seed, conservation agriculture, efficient irrigation, agroforestry and timely weather and market information.
On the ground, this should translate into restored land, better‑managed water, farming methods that survive erratic rainfall, and new income sources along the river – particularly for women and young people. That could mean, for example, upgrading smallholder irrigation schemes along the Gwayi, Manyame or Save sub‑catchments in Zimbabwe, or strengthening fish value chains on Lake Kariba and down to the delta in Mozambique.
How Will National Needs Be Balanced With Basin Priorities?
Every shared river programme must wrestle with a basic question: how to respect national priorities while delivering basin‑wide benefits. ZAMCOM Executive Secretary Felix Ngamlagosi did not dodge it.
“While the individual investments must respond to the priorities of each participating country, they must all contribute to common basin‑wide results,” he said.
Climate shocks, land degradation and declining ecosystem services don’t stop at border posts. A poorly managed catchment upstream can silt up a dam downstream; a wetland restored in one country can blunt floods in another. The Harare meeting underlined that responses must be coordinated regionally if they are to match the scale of these threats.
Speaking for the SADC Secretariat, Dr Dumsani Mndzebele, Acting Senior Programme Manager for the Water Division, welcomed the coordination among the different funding streams and highlighted BREFOLE‑ZRB’s potential to build resilience through sustainable agriculture, nature‑based solutions and better land and water management.
FFA Explainer:
Nature‑based solutions use healthy ecosystems – forests, wetlands, grasslands and soils – to reduce risks like floods, droughts and erosion. In farming areas, that can mean protecting riverbanks with vegetation, restoring wetlands that store floodwater or integrating trees into cropland.
What Commitments Emerged In Harare?
From the opening session, the mood was one of impatience with more planning. Engineer Emma Ndhlovu, Senior Water Officer in Zambia’s Ministry of Water Development and Sanitation, set the tone.
“The time has come to move from programme preparation to programme ownership and action,” she told delegates, calling for sustained engagement across sectors and borders.
Dr Laouali Garba, Division Manager for Agricultural Research, Production and Sustainability at the African Development Bank, put the shift into language any farmer would recognise.
“We planted together, and we need to harvest together for the benefit of the most vulnerable communities of the Zambezi basin,” he said.
Garba stressed that the resources mobilised must become community resilience, food security, jobs for women and youth, and climate change mitigation, and reaffirmed the Bank’s commitment to backing a bankable investment programme.
The workshop’s recommendations aimed to anchor that rhetoric in practice. ZAMCOM member countries were urged to:
- Commit at least 10 percent of their national budgets to spending that supports the basin programme’s benefits and priority areas.
- Keep implementation capacity close to communities, not only in capital cities.
- Track gender outcomes, ensuring women gain real economic and decision‑making benefits.
- Strengthen land governance to curb degradation and resolve conflicts.
- Align monitoring systems so progress in one country can be compared with another.
What Does This Mean For Zimbabwean Farmers And Communities?
For Zimbabwe, the Zambezi is not an abstract policy issue. It runs through the lives of smallholders in Mbire, Hwange and Binga; of fishers on Lake Kariba; of miners in Mashonaland West; and of urban residents in Harare and Bulawayo who depend on linked catchments for water and power.
Engineer Tinayeshe Mutazu, Chief Director for Water Resources, Irrigation Development and National WASH Coordination, spoke for Permanent Secretary Professor Obert Jiri in Harare. He pressed for BREFOLE‑ZRB to deliver real benefits on the ground, backed by national ownership, solid implementation plans and safeguards that are ready to activate.
Those benefits could dovetail with NDS1 priorities: rehabilitating ageing irrigation schemes in the middle Zambezi valley, promoting climate‑smart cropping systems in semi‑arid districts, and restoring degraded hillsides and riverbanks that currently send silt into dams and canals.
In Muzarabani or Mbire, where farmers already face erratic rainfall, a well‑designed BREFOLE‑ZRB project could mean:
- Support to diversify from maize alone into sorghum, cowpeas and drought‑tolerant horticulture.
- Efficient smallholder irrigation using low‑pressure drip systems powered by solar pumps.
- Training for youth and women’s groups in processing and marketing produce linked to Zambezi water – vegetables, fish, livestock products – much like emerging hubs covered in our reporting on horticulture value chains.
- Community‑led rangeland and forest restoration to protect both grazing and river flows.
For a young farmer in Binga experimenting with tomatoes under drip irrigation, or a women’s co‑operative near Kariba drying vegetables and smoking fish for urban markets, the value of BREFOLE‑ZRB will be measured in steadier harvests, reduced flood damage and more reliable incomes.
How Are Land Restoration And Water Management Connected?
UNCCD’s message in Harare linked land and water in a way farmers see every rainy season. When hillsides are bare, rivers run brown after a storm – and then run dry too soon.
Ms Cathrine Mutambirwa, Programme Coordinator for Land Degradation Neutrality and Land Restoration at the UNCCD Global Mechanism, highlighted the partnership with ZAMCOM and the AfDB and encouraged countries to seize available finance opportunities.
She stressed that land and water sectors must work together, noting that “drought is directly linked to water resources management.” Land stripped of vegetation and topsoil holds less water. Rains run off instead of soaking in, deepening drought impacts and amplifying floods. Restoring landscapes – whether through reforestation, soil conservation or wetland rehabilitation – becomes a way of managing the river itself.
For smallholders in Zimbabwe’s Zambezi catchments, that can mean practical steps: vetiver grass on contours, half‑moons and infiltration pits, protected headwaters, community rules against streambank cultivation. Over time, such measures store more water in the landscape, replenish streams and buffer shocks – aligning with both NDS1 and global goals such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the African Union’s Agenda 2063.
What Are The Next Steps For The Zambezi Resilience Fund?
The Harare workshop was a precursor to an Appraisal Mission that will shape BREFOLE‑ZRB’s final design and determine where, and how fast, money starts to flow.
In closing remarks delivered by Dr Garba, Mrs Eyerusalem Fasika, the AfDB’s Country Manager for Zimbabwe, underscored the importance of restoring degraded landscapes, strengthening climate‑resilient agriculture and opening opportunities for women and youth.
“We have a shared responsibility to prepare a high‑quality, bankable investment programme,” the remarks noted, urging countries to send inputs on time and complete the requirements needed to move financing forward.
That is where the hardest work now lies. Each of the eight countries must refine its project pipeline, confirm co‑financing and lock in implementing arrangements that can carry regional ambitions down to ward‑level extension and village‑level action.
For the farmers, fishers and families who rely on the Zambezi, the measure of success will not be the communiqués signed in Harare, but the quiet shifts on the land and in the river – a maize crop that survives a dry spell in Muzarabani, a Kariba fisher landing a sustainable catch, a youth‑run agribusiness in Siavonga or Kariba town that turns climate‑smart production into jobs.
If BREFOLE‑ZRB delivers on its promise, those shifts will add up to something bigger: a river basin that still feeds, powers and sustains its people in a warmer world.
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