Make it Grow

The Make it Grow project is supporting community-based, sustainable food initiatives in Zimbabwe to build capacity and create video proposals.

In the face of increasing food insecurities, community-owned food initiatives and innovations are important for enhancing resilience and embedding more sustainable approaches into our food systems. 

However, despite the fact that great ideas for low-cost, dynamic solutions to food insecurity are often already present at the grassroots level, community-based organisations (CBOs) tend to have little access to start-up funding and very limited capacity to develop written funding applications; they are therefore limited in their ability to communicate and implement new sustainable food projects.

Make it Grow has supported CBOs to build their own capacity to harness the power of video and related ICTs, to communicate their project ideas through participatory video proposals and thus, to become more capable of getting their innovative, community-owned food initiatives started.

Between October 2020 and November 2021, several interactive online courses have been hosted by the Institute for Sustainable Food, involving more than 40 Zimbabwean organisations in total and approximately 60 trainees.  More than 125 hours of workshops have been facilitated so far for the partner organisations.  With several video proposals now complete, groups have been supported to set up independent fundraising pages to crowdfund for their community-based sustainable food projects.

Visit the project page for Let's Eat! Food Processing for Nutritional Security and Income Generation in Chibuwe.

Visit the project page for Inclusive Food Security for Persons with Disabilities.

View all the Make it Grow project proposals.

Through learning by doing, and interacting with our participants during more than 50 workshops, we have designed a methodological process and prepared a set of online resources for community groups and facilitators. The learning toolkit can be used to support straightforward ways of facilitating participatory video proposals.

Download a PDF copy of How to Make a Video proposal below:

In the summer of 2021, Make it Grow hosted three University of Sheffield students to undertake research placements, via the SURE scheme. Research topics included Participant experiences of and reflections on spaces of digital inclusion or exclusion, and; Community Project Impact Pathways. These visual abstracts below provide an overview of how the student’s approached their (remote) research interactions and their main findings.

If you would like further information on the studies or on the Make it Grow project, please contact us: at makeitgrow.pv@gmail.com or p.ngwenya@sheffield.ac.uk.