COMACO
Making conservation profitable for farming families in Zambia
The Trafigura Foundation supports an initiative enabling rural communities to overcome poverty by earning more from sustainable farm produce while restoring their land and conserving biodiversity.
The challenge
In Zambia’s countryside, hardship and ecosystem degradation
are mutually reinforcing. Some 79 percent of people in rural areas live below the poverty line. Most of the workforce is employed in agriculture. However, farmers lack access to reliable markets and fair prices.
Many resort to short-term destructive practices like slash-and-burn
agriculture, poaching and charcoal production chemical fertilisers, leading to deforestation, soil degradation and the destruction of Zambia’s natural capital. Erratic rainfall and recurrent drought drive crop losses, further increasing the pressure on farmers to adopt harmful coping strategies.
The solution
COMACO, short for “Community Markets for Conservation”, fosters
large-scale conservation by making it profitable for rural families. It uses
agroforestry and chemical-free agriculture to reduce poverty while building the climate resilience of both communities and ecosystems.
Founded in 2009, the social enterprise assists communities in
establishing conservation plans and cooperatives and gaining the skills they need to manage their land. It also buys their crops at premium prices and sells them under the “It’s Wild!” brand, rewards top performers with “conservation dividends” and generates additional revenue for communities from carbon credits.
Through commercial supply contracts with institutional buyers, COMACO provides one of its locally sourced nutritious products into independently managed school feeding programmes, contributing to improved access to food for school going children and nutrition outcomes while reinforcing sustainable market linkages for smallholder farmers.
With this model, COMACO has established conservation areas covering 1.7 million ha of land in the Luangwa Valley and the Kafue National
Park area. More than 244 million trees have been planted, improving soil
fertility and reducing the need for chemical fertiliser. In all, about 335,000
households have benefitted, including 2,380 individuals who have given up wildlife poaching and engaged into alternative trades.
Partnership impact
Support from the Trafigura Foundation will enable COMACO to
strengthen its operations, including by digitalising its tools and processes,
and expand them to high-biodiversity landscapes in the Lower Zambezi region.
Specific goals of the partnership include:
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Planting another 80 million trees
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Converting 200 illegal hunters to alternative livelihoods
annually -
Installing 15,000 beehives in community forests
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Onboarding 160,000 additional households into
the programme, altogether reaching 2.5 million people with improved resilience to climate change
Visit COMACO’s website.
Other partnerships in the same area of work
Accelerating the growth and impact of community-led conservation in Africa
Responding rapidly and effectively to humanitarian crises
