African bird’s eye chilli is one of the few crops that can turn a few hundred square metres into a meaningful income for a Zimbabwean smallholder. In 2017, one farmer in Gokwe South earned USD 1,800 from 378 square metres of chilli, against total costs of USD 188 — a net margin of USD 1,612.
This is the story of Caritas Dube of Chisina, Ward 23, in Gokwe South District, and how a household that had lost its cash crop found a replacement.
Background: when cotton stopped paying
Caritas is married to Aramu Dube, a former head of Mudzongwe Primary School. Aramu came to Chisina in 1969 as a teacher, married Caritas in 1972, and built a homestead where the family farmed cotton, maize and groundnuts for decades.
They stopped growing cotton in 2009, when the collapse of international commodity markets pushed prices below the cost of production. That left the family with maize and groundnuts they could not sell at viable prices, and the Grain Marketing Board’s failure to pay on time turned a difficult season into a crisis.
“The decision to stop growing cotton was very difficult for us seeing that we had grown the crop since the 70’s. Cotton income supplemented my teaching salary, enabling us to send our children to good schools and develop our homestead.” — Aramu Dube
When Aramu reached retirement age and left teaching, the household became fully dependent on farming for its livelihood.
The turning point: a field day, and an admission
In 2015, still looking for an alternative, Caritas attended a field day at Mr Mthombeni’s homestead in Ganyungu, organised by the SIMBA programme. She is candid that she had avoided the programme until then:
“Although I am typically a proactive member of the community, I had shunned the SIMBA programme because of its insistence on Conservation Agriculture. Digging of planting stations was too labour-intensive and was associated with poor people who have no draught power. We called it ’dhigaufe’, which is literally translated as ’dig and die’.”
The field day changed her mind. It introduced two contracted cash crops: African bird’s eye chilli, bought by Better Agriculture, who supply the international restaurant group Nando’s, and sesame, bought by IETC.
What she actually planted
- 750 chilli seedlings bought from Better Agriculture at USD 0.01 each, planted 30 November 2016
- Area: approximately 378 square metres
- Inputs: 15.2 kg Compound C, 15.2 kg Ammonium Nitrate, 15 ml Lambda
- Land preparation done by the family; the only hired labour was harvesting, at USD 47 for two people
- Alongside this, 1.25 ha of sesame yielding 950 kg valued at USD 570
The numbers
Each plant produced roughly 800 g of dried chilli — equivalent to a wet harvest of more than 47 tonnes per hectare.
| Chilli sales (600 kg dried at USD 3.00/kg) | USD 1,800 |
| Inputs | 101 |
| Chemicals | 7 |
| Labour (harvesting) | 47 |
| Financial services | 18 |
| Fuel for irrigation | 15 |
| Training, extension, land preparation, transport, water | 0 |
| Total costs | USD 188 |
| Net margin | USD 1,612 |
Scaled up, that margin is equivalent to over USD 42,000 per hectare. The zero-cost lines are not omissions: training and extension were absorbed by Better Agriculture as an embedded service, land preparation was done by the family, and the buyer operates a collection point locally so no transport was needed.
What the income was spent on
- Drilling and equipping a borehole
- A perimeter fence around the homestead
- Building a kitchen and a pit latrine
Payment came through an electronic system called TextaCash, which required a trip to the CABS branch at Gokwe Centre and a 1% withdrawal fee. For many chilli farmers in the area, it was their first experience of banking.
What happened next
The Dubes planned to expand from 750 plants (378 m²) in 2017 to 2,000 plants (1,008 m²) in 2018, and to continue growing sesame. The SIMBA programme also worked on hygiene, health, internal savings clubs and nutrition gardens, which Caritas took up alongside the farming.
What this story shows
Contract farming with a credible buyer, technical support provided as part of the deal, and a crop suited to a small plot can change a household’s finances without requiring land the household does not have. It also shows that resistance to a new practice is often reasonable rather than stubborn — and that a well-run demonstration answers it better than persuasion.
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