Strengthening coherence between social protection and productive interventions: The case of Zambia

The aim of this study is to explore the distributional impacts on poverty and income of two programmes in Zambia, the Home Grown School Feeding (HGSF) programme and the Conservation Agriculture Scale-Up (CASU) project, complementing the impact evaluation findings by Prifti & Grinspun (2019). These programmes target different parts of the population but are partly overlapping; they aim to influence poverty and food security through different channels. In the World Food Programme (WFP)’s HGSF modality, school feeding or provision of free meals for schoolchildren is complemented with procurement of food used for the meals from local smallholders. The purchase scheme aims to provide market access for smallholders, hence improving income stability and incentives to invest, ultimately increasing their productivity and reducing poverty. The objectives of school meals alone are improvement in schoolchildren’s nutrition as well as improvement in school attendance and hence human capital accumulation. Conservation agriculture (CA) consists of production methods that reduce farmers’ vulnerability to climate risks and improve productivity. The CASU programme promoted the use of such methods among smallholders through training and demonstration and provision of inputs, aiming for adoption of more sustainable farming which increases farm productivity in the long run.