The African sun beats down on the fields of Kafue – a town in Zambia's Lusaka Province – where Grace Nyirongo Phiri walks between rows of lush, green crops that are just sprouting. A gentle hum is the only sound as water flows through a network of tubes, delivering life directly to the roots of each plant.
Just a few years ago, this same scene was one of exhaustion and uncertainty. "Watering with hose pipes would take the whole day," Phiri recalls, the memory still fresh in her mind. "You could be watering up to midnight. The crops were not receiving enough water… they were not uniform."
Hundreds of kilometers away, in a bright, air-conditioned lecture theatre at the University of Zambia (UNZA), Kangwa Bwalya listens intently. With her in the hall are 350 of her fellow civil engineering students, a far cry from the cramped, century-old rooms that once defined the campus. In Kabwe, in the country's Central District, Joseph Banda unlocks the door to his agribusiness shop, a tangible dream built from the confidence to create it.
These three Zambians — farmer, student, and entrepreneur —have never met. Yet, their stories are linked by a common thread: a transformative intervention by the African Development Fund--the concessional financing window of the African Development Bank Group. The Fund is sowing seeds of growth, knowledge, and opportunity across the country.
Read more at African Development Bank Group
