We often talk about small-farming as a means of poverty alle­vi­a­tion. In addi­tion to grow­ing grains, an arti­cle we found today talks about bee­keep­ing in Zim­babwe being used as a means for gen­er­at­ing income.

Zim­babwe was once known as a honey mak­ing haven. In recent years how­ever, many of the tress that bees built their hives upon have been chopped down.

From All Africa writer Shin­gai Jena describes this project to help train bee­keep­ers in Zim­babwe. Jena also spells out the prof­its that can come from a good har­vest of honey.

The idea of bee­keep­ing as a means of alle­vi­at­ing poverty was con­ceived as way back as 1992 when the coun­try was imple­ment­ing the Eco­nomic Struc­tural Adjust­ment Pro­gramme when Zim­babwe was hit by drought.

In order to over­come effects of the dev­as­tat­ing drought, some con­cerned indi­vid­u­als who included Women’s Affairs, Gen­der and Com­mu­nity Devel­op­ment Min­is­ter Olivia Muchena founded the Zim­babwe Farm­ers Devel­op­ment Trust with the view to iden­tify low cost projects of alle­vi­at­ing poverty and agreed on beekeeping.

ZDFT exec­u­tive direc­tor, Tichasiyana Mapon­dera, said bee­keep­ing was agreed on because of its min­i­mum fund­ing require­ments since it uses read­ily avail­able nat­ural resources such as land, trees and the bees.

At incep­tion, the project tar­geted small-scale farm­ers as well as rural com­mu­ni­ties in and around the Hurungwe dis­trict of Mashona­land West province as a pilot project.

To date it has been launched in more than 25 dis­tricts in the country.

How­ever, with­drawal of sup­port by the W.K. Kel­logg foun­da­tion which pro­vided fund­ing for pro­duc­ing mod­ern bee­keep­ing mate­ri­als has ham­pered progress as plans were under­way to spread the project to other parts of the country.

“We urgently need a US$100 000 cash injec­tion to facil­i­tate fur­ther train­ing pro­grammes and remu­ner­a­tion of staff who train and man­u­fac­ture bee­keep­ing equip­ment,” said Mapondera.

The fund­ing required is small com­pared to the prof­its that farm­ers gen­er­ate per year from honey production.

With raw honey going for up to US$2 per kilo­gramme, a small-scale farmer with an aver­age of 100 mod­ern Kenyan top bar hives which pro­duce at least 30 kilo­grammes each of raw honey and are har­vested four times a year, earns at least US$6 000 per quarter.

In Buhera, there are more than 300 com­mu­nal farm­ers involved in bee­keep­ing who, when har­vests are good, pro­duce up to 1, 2 tonnes per quar­ter, which trans­lates into a gross total of income of US$1 mil­lion a year.

With such impres­sive fig­ures, words such as des­ti­tute and unem­ployed would cease to exist in the Zim­bab­wean vocubulary.

Tak­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion that work­ers in the coun­try are earn­ing on aver­age US$150 per month, rural folk would not find any rea­son to envy their rel­a­tives in urban areas who toil the whole month to get paid.

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