CARE Zambia recently conducted a “Pre-mortem” on the Enhanced Vegetable Production and Commercialization Project (EVPC). CARE piloted this approach on the EVPC project to generate plausible reasons for the project’s potential failure and develop solid solutions that will address the identified potential challenges. The project is directly targeting 680 female small holder households (an equivalent of 3,400 female household farmers) to grow quality crops and gain access to reliable markets. The goal of the project is to improve the income and food security of rural women and girls in 11 food insecure communities of Kalomo, Zimba and Kazungula districts in the Southern Province of Zambia. *A pre-mortem is the hypothetical opposite of a post-mortem. An adaptation of a medical post-mortem, a pre-mortem in a business or project context is often conducted at the beginning of a project rather than the end, so that the project can be improved at the outset rather than autopsied. The animated two-day workshop brought farmers, agro-dealers, CARE, and a representative from the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (MAL) together to brainstorm on potential problems and solutions. The discussion mainly focused on the commercialization aspect of the project. After working through the detailed pre-mortem methodology, a robust action plan was developed with related accountabilities. As a result of this action plan, several initiatives have been identified including business skills training for farmers and agro-dealers as well as community sensitization surrounding the roles of the various parties in the vegetable supply chain. The workshop concluded with a visit to a successful Village Savings and Loan (VSL) operation, where the farmers and agro-dealers from EVPC were able to observe and ask questions to the VSL group in order to glean learnings for their respective communities. Ultimately, CARE hopes that this pre-mortem session will be fundamental to the potential success of the project. The EVPC pre-mortem will now serve as a role model for similar sessions to be conducted in future for other projects. CARE believes that this new initiative will be a building block both for facilitating a projects success, and a benchmark against which to identify learnings as it is contrasted to eventual outcomes.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 11:57:07 +0000
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