Windhoek Rural Green Scheme initiative

Generally agriculture in Namibia is expected to meet the dual objectives of providing food and helping people to escape poverty. The expectation is that if the gap between actual and potential yields can be closed, smallholders will grow sufficient crops to feed their families, with a surplus to sell, thus meeting food security needs and bringing in an income to move them out of poverty. In practice, this is often not possible. While technologies already exist that can raise smallholder farmers’ yields 3 or 4 times, the small size of land available to them limits how much can be grown.

Rural development programs targeting smallholders have to acknowledge their heterogeneity with respect to their livelihoods’ strategies and that not all households that identify themselves as farmers have the time, money or even the desire to implement new technologies.

Therefore, policymakers need to ensure that the knowledge and technologies that are generated by the agricultural research community are compatible with, and available to, the right target groups. A portfolio of flexible, inclusive farm-level interventions is needed with attractive technologies matching the diversity of producers in the urban-rural.