Projects Overview

Development Education Programme

BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition Stand 2021

2021 Science for Development Award Winner Aronnya Khan Zakaria from Castletroy College in Limerick. Her project was on ‘The Development of Racial Prejudice in Children’, which seeks to identify why some people learn to view the world through racist stereotypes.

Self Help Africa’s Development Education team continued to host online workshops and presentations in the early part of 2021, and returned with complete ‘in person’ activities in schools across the country in September 2021, at the beginning of the academic year.

Improved dietary diversity and high levels of adoption of climate smart agricultural approaches were among the standout achievements captured in the third-party review of the Better Extension Training Transforming Economic Returns (BETTER) project in Malawi. READ MORE..

Thereafter, the programme delivered a blended combination of in person and virtual classroom workshops. The Dev Ed team delivered just under 200 workshops in total in 2021, reaching more than 3,000 students.

The programme was focussed primarily on post-primary students, but extended its activities in 2021 with Third Level teacher training courses at Maynooth College, University of Galway and Trinity College Dublin. The Development Education programme further extended its work within the informal education sector with presentations and workshops to early school leavers engaged with the Youthreach programme in different parts of Ireland.

Activities within Third Level institutions included an eight-week module for trainee teachers as part of a Social Justice module at NUI Maynooth, and two lectures to Professional Master of Education (PME) students, as part of their Sociology Module at Trinity College, Dublin, and the presentation of workshops for students as part of the annual Development Education Day at Galway University.

Self Help Africa participated in the annual BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition for the second successive year as an exclusively online event in 2021, and more than 500 students from schools across Ireland took part in virtual tours of our stand at the event.

Late in the spring, the eighth annual Science for Development showcase was hosted by the Department of Foreign Affairs at Iveagh House as an in-person event, with students from nine schools from across Ireland participating in an event that was staged in a restricted numbers setting because of the pandemic.

The Irish Aid sponsored Science for Development (S4D) competition, which encourages science students to address challenges affecting people in resource-poor countries around the globe was further extended in 2021, with SHA’s Dev Ed team devising and presenting a new series of webinars designed to encourage more students and teachers to engage with the S4D project. More than 200 students and teachers attended this series of online webinars, which were addressed by a range of speakers including country programme staff from Zambia and Malawi, and by environmental campaigner and journalist John Gibbons.

Resources developed by Self Help Africa for the S4D venture including broadcast recordings of the first webinar series are now available for teachers and students to access on BT’s own education hub.

Self Help Africa’s Development Education team was also involved in supporting the delivery of two major new online public engagement initiatives launched by Self Help Africa in 2021. The first of of these was an International Womens’ Day webinar that featured speakers from Kenya, Zambia, Uganda, Belgium, Norway and Ireland, and attracted over 200 online attendees. In the autumn, the Development Education team participated in the presentation of a series of five weekly online seminars, Food for Thought, which attracted over 240 participants.

investing in enterprise

The ENTERPRISE Zambia Challenge Fund awarded match-funding grants totalling more than €6.8m to 15 companies in 2021, as the EU-funded enterprise development project moved into its second year.

Although the Zambia’s business sector and wider economy endured wholesale disruption as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, ENTERPRISE Zambia rolled out two grant calls in 2021, and awarded funding that allowed recipient companies to expand and diversify their activities in a broad number of agri-business sectors. READ MORE...

Both funding rounds were highly competitive, with a total of more than 430 businesses submitting expressions of interest to the Fund, during the year.

Recipients received match funding investment grants ranging from a quarter of a million euro up to €880,000 operate in a range of agricultural value chains, including soyabean, cotton, commercial vegetable and flower production animal hides, sunflower seeds, groundnuts, fish farming, pig rearing and baking.

The Fund also awarded grants to companies supporting the logistics surrounding agri-business, namely companies involved in food exportation services, agri-input provision and solar and biogas generation. Grant support that has been provided by ENTERPRISE Zambia in 2021 is expected to create markets for up to 230,000 growers and producers in the country. The selected companies will also provide several thousand permanent jobs, and additional seasonal employment.

The ENTERPRISE Zambia Challenge Fund is funded by the European Union and the Government of Zambia, and is being implemented by Self Help Africa in partnership with Imani Development Ltd. The project will invest a total of €26M in supporting agri-business investment that enables small and medium-sized enterprises transition to greener and more sustainable agri-food systems.

ENTERPRISE Zambia awarded grant support to five agri-business ventures in 2020. Meanwhile, Self Help Africa’s AgriFI Kenya Challenge Fund continued to support the creation and expansion of agri enterprise businesses in this country, in 2021. Backed by the European Commission and by SlovakAid, AgriFI has provided business investment funding to a total of 34 companies in a five year period.

Livestock - a vital asset for smallholder farmers

Livestock plays a vital role in the economic, cultural and social existence of millions of small-scale farming families in Africa.

The African continent has an estimated 800 million livestock keepers, with the sector con- tributing between 30 to 50 percent of agricultural GDP, and supporting the food security and livelihood needs of about one-third of Africa’s population, more than 350 million people.

Animals are often a family’s most valuable asset, providing dairy products to sell, food to eat, pulling power for farm ploughs and transport for the family. Indeed, many of the continent’s poorest farmers earn their livings by selling livestock and animal products.

Livestock plays an important cultural and social role too, with cattle, goats, camel and sheep often serving as ‘on the hoof’ savings - a bankable asset to be traded and sold - when funds are required to pay school fees, or are required by the household for some other purpose.

Across its’ programme portfolio, Self Help Africa supports a broad range of animal breeding programmes to support households in with animal husbandry, and assist families to develop opportunities to make money.

In many instances, programmes are used as a means of supporting income generating activities for rural women.

Pigs, goats, sheep, cattle and poultry rearing all have the potential for households to diversity their activities and enhance their income generating potential, while beekeeping is being harnessed widely as a means not just for families to generate an income, but also for the environmental benefits that bee pollination contribute to the wider environment. A recently concluded project in Uganda supported over 2,000 smallholders in the north-east of the country to increase the productivity of beekeeping, and realise the potential of honey and other bi-products as commodities that could be sold into local, regional and international markets.

We are also currently supporting activities that improve and strengthen local veterinary outreach services, provide training to paravets and support community-based animal health workers. Meanwhile, our AgriFI Kenya Challenge Fund is supporting a private sector business that is establishing a network of 400 paravets to dispense drugs and provide treatment to the livestock of pastoralist farmers living in hard-to-reach areas of the country’s far north.

Elsewhere, dairy development projects are being implemented in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Kenya, pig rearing is a part of programme activities in Uganda, Zambia and Malawi, while poultry rearing is widespread.

Meanwhile, in Ireland, Self Help Africa is participating in a research project with Queen’s University, Belfast, that is piloting a programme of goat health management through a network of farmer field schools in Malawi.