GROOTS Zimbabwe HBCA has embarked on a Food Security and Resilience Campaign. This campaign reaches out to grassroots rural women to pass on vital information on climate change, perceived challenges, and coping mechanisms. Before this intervention program, women in remote areas were not aware of climate change. They were seeking their traditional leaders’ advice in dealing with recurrent droughts, and thus were being overburdened with the traditional rituals of appeasing the rain gods. Women would waste the little amount of grains that they had harvested to brew African beer at the expense of saving it for consumption or seeding during the rainy season.

Through this new campaign, GROOTS Zimbabwe HBCA has been very active in facilitating training of caregivers in income generating projects (IGPs), such as piggery, poultry, peanut butter making, and gardening. Caregivers who have gone through GROOTS Zimbabwe nurturing, mentorship, and empowerment programs are now producing food for their own consumption, for the community, and to donate to orphans and elderly members of the community, thereby ensuring improved nutritional standards for HBCA patients.

Moreover, GROOTS Zimbabwe has launched various advocacy and lobbying programs targeting communities as well as community, traditional, and church leaders. They are advocating for irrigation schemes, small grain cropping, rural women prioritisation in agricultural inputs distribution, and land allocation to landless women including those with a passion for farming.

Since the inception of the IGPs, caregivers play a crucial role in the broadening of the micro-economic sectors. The Alliance facilitates exchange programs for various caregivers undertaking IGPs as a way of promoting information exchange, resilience, and best practice sharing.

Lastly, GROOTS Zimbabwe HBCA is in the process of training caregivers in resource mobilisation as a way of broadening rural women capital base, particularly those who are willing to forgo the now highly risky traditional seasonal farming to the more drought resistant small grain cropping, vegetable gardening, cattle ranching, piggery, poultry and goat rearing, among other projects.