Project mitigates effects of climate change

Seventy-five year-old Grace Saulosi inherited a piece of land from her parents many years ago which she has been tilling for crop production.

The resident of Chimpakati Village in Traditional Authority Chanthunya in Balaka says cultivating on the land has been rewarding as she was able to harvest enough to adequately support her family of five.

“I never applied fertiliser to my crop field. Yet, from one and a half acres, I could realise close to 15 bags of 50 kilogrammes of maize. This was adequate to take us to the next harvest,” she recalls.

However, by and large, Saulosi started noticing changes in her harvests. The effects of global warming and climate change led to devastating floods which negatively affected her crop production.

“I noticed that most of the time my crop field was waterlogged and crops could be submerged, in the process. As a result, during harvesting season, I could realise only two bags of 50 kilogrammes of maize, far below the minimum requirement to feed my household to the next harvesting season,” she said.

As farming seasons came and went by, Saulosi says she further noticed a gully developing in her field, which in turn, partitioned her farmland into two, giving way to the water.

At an instant, she says: “I thought this was the end of the problem, alas! It was the genesis of more misery.

“The gully continued to develop, a situation that forced me to surrender the land to my children on the understanding that they would be able to manage it.”

The case of Saulosi was not new in her village and the entire Balaka District. Most of her colleagues were facing the same predicament and the situation led to household food insecurity.

It is, therefore, against this background that development partners decide to address the devastating effects of climate change by implementing various programmes.

Climate Smart – Public Works Programme (CS-PWP), an off-shoot of the Enhanced Public Works Programme – EPWP which is being championed in district councils across the country by the Government of Malawi through the National Local Government Finance Committee (NLGFC) with funding from the World Bank, is one of such initiatives.

The programme rolled out last year in Balaka District targeting 18 220 participants with specific projects such as gully reclamation, re-afforestation, construction of swales, stone bands and check dams.

The implementation of the project’s interventions is being carried out in catchment areas where rural communities are engaged to work at a fee for 12 days and contribute by working for seven days for free in a cycle.

Following Saulosi’s narrative and that of several other community members, her land, which falls under Chimpakati Catchment Area Committee in Balaka, has been earmarked for CS-PWP where check dams are being constructed along the gully to control the flow of water.

Participants in the project are doing land reclamation activities through construction of swales, check dams, as well as stone bands to control the flow of water to Saulosi’s plot, which for many years has been providing crop yields, but changed four years ago when a huge gully developed because of uncontrollable run-off.

Balaka District senior assistant land resources conser ation officer James Kadaya explains that check dams are small dams constructed across a drainage ditch or channel to reduce the velocity of water flow, reduce run-off, erosion and gullies in the channel, let alone allows sediments to settle down.

He says a gully is a channel cut by concentrated run-of f through which water commonly flows during and immediately after heavy rains.

“Gullies once formed need to be controlled. Firstly, there is need to conserve the whole catchment where the problem originates before undertaking any gully control,” he states.

NLGFC social protection officer Ina Thombozi says that due to the environmental change, CS-PWP has come to mitigate some of the effects of climate change.

She says: “As you might be aware, most areas in Malawi have no trees and most farming fields have no fertile top-soil as there is a lot of siltation and rampant cutting down of trees.

“ Environment a l degradation has resulted in reduced crop yields which lead to food insecurity. Women also travel long distances to fetch firewood and water instead of engaging in meaningful income generating activities, this also leads to poverty among communities.”

She discloses that catchments will be assessed every cycle to assess the impact of CS-EPWP.

Balaka district commissioner Darwin Mngoli acknowledges that Balaka is one district where land is dry because the environment was heavily degraded.

“The intervention by NLGFC is timely. The activities will go a long way in restoring soil fertility,” he points out