The Harvest Fund Africa

In its pilot program, The Harvest Fund (THF) launched a competitive selection process in the Kafue District of Zambia to select one winning female farming cooperative. THF used an 8-point scoring metric to assess the cooperatives based on their potential as well as disadvantaged status. The winning cooperative enters into a 9-month bootcamp that provides its female farming members with leadership development and maize-production technical assistance using unique instruction methods. To encourage behavioral change, the program uses performance-based incentives to reward the female farmers with innovative agricultural technologies. At the end of the program, the cooperative will be linked with a local agricultural microfinancier to boost the productivity of one of their other agricultural lines of business.