Solutions Explained

Zimbabwe's climate-resilient crops vital for Africa's food security

Climate change is pushing Zimbabwe's conventional crop value chains toward failure across all five of the country's agroecological regions. Marondera University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology is betting on vegetables that grew wild for generations, now bred, seeded, and sold back through a farmer network 430 strong.

A smallholder farmer in Zimbabwe's Honde Valley. Credit: Doreen Hove / USAID Zimbabwe.

Climate change is hitting all five of Zimbabwe's farming regions

Prof Justice Nyamangara is the founding Vice-Chancellor of Marondera University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology, chartered in 2015 and operating independently of the University of Zimbabwe since 2017. It is the only university in the country dedicated solely to agricultural science, built under Zimbabwe's Education 5.0 model, which requires universities to combine teaching and research with innovation and industrialisation.

"Climate change has really challenged us," Nyamangara told Innovation Report. "Most of the crops which we had developed the commercial value chains might fail. So we need to come up with new crops, new value chains." He described a country split by geography. "Zimbabwe has got five contrasting agroecological regions. In the east we have suffered the impacts of flooding and landslides. In the western part of the country that's where we have very severe droughts. In the middle, which used to be the grain basket, we have had erratic rains, the season starts late then it stops suddenly, or there is a long drought spell in between."

The university breeds wild vegetables for commercial planting

The university's answer runs through the African Indigenous Vegetables Institute, an interdisciplinary institute working on species including spider plant, amaranth, black jack, African eggplant, black nightshade, okra, and cowpea, alongside traditional grains such as sorghum, pearl millet, and finger millet. "We believe our indigenous crops, be they indigenous vegetables or traditional grains, that's where the answer is," Nyamangara said. "But the value chains are poorly developed. Even in terms of the dishes that are prepared, our young kids do not like them, luckily, most of those crops are actually more nutritious than the ones we were promoting."

Three crops in the scheme

Spider plant

A leafy vegetable that grows wild across Southern Africa, harvested for its bitter, mineral-rich leaves, the palmate cluster visible here. Tolerant of poor soil and low water, it is usually the first crop farmers already recognise from the bush rather than the field.

Amaranth

Both leaves and grain are eaten, and the plant produces seed prolifically, the reason it suits an outgrower scheme built around seed volume. It grows fast enough to fit into a single rainy season.

Cowpea

A nitrogen-fixing legume that improves the soil it grows in as well as feeding people, cowpea leaves and beans are both harvested. It is one of the more established indigenous crops already sold in Zimbabwean markets.

Breeding work at the institute is led in part by researcher Mr Gonhi, who holds a Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils fellowship from CIMMYT and BecA-ILRI, and was named 2026 Presidential Outstanding Early Career Researcher for his work on climate-resilient breeding of indigenous vegetables and traditional grains. "We need a lot more work in breeding," Nyamangara said. "We need a lot more work in biotechnology so that we can boost the yield potential, and for some of them even the taste, so the younger generation can find the food stuffs made out of those crops more palatable."

"We have an outgrower scheme where farmers grow the seed we provide, then we buy the seed from them, we clean it and we package it," Nyamangara said. "For me I think it's a good example of an innovative project where something which most farmers thought only grew in the wild has become commercialised, and they are realising a livelihood out of it."

From 180 farmers to 430 in one season

The scheme trained 180 farmers in the 2024/25 season, producing seed sufficient for more than 300 hectares, sold through agro-dealers Profarmer Zimbabwe and Farmbizz. A further 250 farmers joined for 2025/26, bringing the total to 430 farmers across more than ten wards of Marondera District. "We plan to put up a small plant," Nyamangara said. "For that to happen we will need larger volumes."

Perception has shifted alongside the numbers. "It was a vegetable of last resort," Nyamangara said. "Now, because non-communicable diseases are increasing, people are much more aware of nutrition." Adoption has run ahead in urban areas so far. "In the village there is still that conception that it is a poor man's vegetable. We think if we start with the urban areas, rural folk tend to think that what is happening in the urban areas is the way to go."

Scaling past one district needs outside partners

Elsewhere, the university is applying the same model to a different crop. In partnership with the OCP Foundation of Morocco, MUAST is building a tamarind processing factory in Binga, in the drought-hit Zambezi Valley, jointly owned with the local community and already producing tamarind paste and juice at a university microfactory. Nyamangara sees that kind of partnership as the template for what comes next. "No university can meaningfully develop without an injection of ideas from outside," he said. "We run seven to eight projects where we are collaborating locally and internationally."

Scaling the vegetable scheme further needs a different kind of partner. "Some of the partnership, of course, could be where we think we've got capacity but maybe we require funding. There is partnership where maybe we have got the value chain, but we don't necessarily have the technology, and that's when we look out to countries that already have the experience, you talk of South Asia, you talk of India, you talk of North Africa." Student and staff exchange programmes would run alongside any technical partnership, he said.

"We are a young and ambitious university," Nyamangara said. "We cooperate with any organisation, large or small, from any part of the world. We are open for business."

Institutions in this article: Marondera University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology, African Indigenous Vegetables Institute, Marondera Rural District Council, OCP Foundation, CIMMYT.