Market-led Dairy Innovations Project (M-DIP)

The M-DIP project will improve the competitveness of 20,000 snallholder dairy farmers in the Zambian southern provinces. The project will establish market-based input services and skills training to increase farmers' productivity. The project started January 2018 and will continue until end December 2019. M-DIP is a follow-up project to Dairy Business Development project

Through public-private partnerships, farmer cooperatives will be linked to service providers to provide their members with access to goods and services such as: agro-inputs, technical services, dairy skills, training, business supoort, fodder, artificial insemination (AI), and access to credit for investments in dairy enterprises.

The project objectives are:

• Strengthen dairy cooperatives' role in service provision by improving their organisation, business management, governance and institutional capacity.

• Improve milk production and productivity by building the capacity of farmers in dairy management.

• Promote improved feeding by working with cooperatives to demonstrate the viability of commercial fodder production enterprises.

• Increase access to financial services by facilitating the formation of two Savings and Credit Cooperatives (SACCOs) within two cooperatives.

• Improve access to breeding services by identifying and nurturing AI enterprises through an innovation fund (to finance AI service providers at cooperative level).

• Contribute towards an improved enabling environment by establishing platforms for dialogue with government, private sector players and other actors.