Transforming Wheat into Opportunity

From Wheat Fields to Kitchen Labs

Participants learned to transform locally produced wheat into a range of nutritious, value-added products, including pumpkin pie, baobab-flavoured cake, moringa buns, rosella muffins, and even millet-wheat blends. Combining wheat with indigenous ingredients such as moringa, baobab, and rosella showed that real innovation often begins when tradition meets experimentation.

The workshop also introduced participants to branding, packaging, and marketing, empowering young people to see wheat as a business opportunity. Women entrepreneurs were central to the sessions, reflecting TAAT’s commitment to inclusive agricultural transformation where women and youth lead value addition and enterprise creation.

This local initiative in Bindura is part of TAAT-Wheat’s broader capacity-building effort across six African countries, including Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Sudan, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, where more than 7,500 people were trained in 2024 alone. These training-of-trainers programs focused on good agricultural practices, post-harvest handling, seed production, value addition, and rural enterprise development, ensuring that skills acquired in classrooms and field schools ripple through communities long after the sessions end.

 

“Through TAAT, we’ve shown that when national programs, research institutions, and farmers work in tandem, Africa’s wheat potential becomes reality. Better seed starts the story, but it’s the systems around it that ensure the story never ends.” - Dr. Zewdie Bishaw, Research Team Leader - Seed Systems, International Nurseries and Seed Health and ICARDA’s Coordinator of the TAAT II Wheat Compact.

Building Value Chains

Zimbabwe’s wheat production has soared in recent years, rising from 426,000 tons in 2022 to over 550,000 tons in 2023 and surpassing 600,000 tons in 2025. Yet, as the workshop highlighted, true economic transformation happens when raw produce becomes market-ready products. A single bucket of wheat may generate US$6, for example, but once processed into bread, cakes, or biscuits, its value can increase nearly tenfold.

Today’s success builds on a strong foundation of research and technology deployment. One standout example is the SAVE wheat variety, developed by ICARDA in collaboration with Zimbabwe’s DRESS. Released in 2022 and adopted nationally in 2023, SAVE is tolerant to heat, drought, and rust and can be grown in both summer and winter, allowing farmers to cultivate wheat year-round. In 2023, Zimbabwe harvested 468,000 tons of wheat from 90,186 hectares, exceeding its national self-sufficiency target by 30%, a milestone supported by the widespread adoption of resilient varieties such as SAVE. In 2025, about 112,000 ha were cultivated during winter and summer production, reaching over 600,000 tons of wheat.

TAAT-Wheat is also strengthening national seed systems by linking public and private sector actors. In 2024, over 16,000 tons of certified seed and 1,200 tons of early-generation seed were produced across the six countries, enabling 167,000 farmers to access high-performing, climate-smart wheat varieties. ICARDA and partners also developed National Wheat Seed Roadmaps and investment plans, endorsed in Ethiopia and underway in Cameroon, Kenya, Mali, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, to guide sustainable seed sector growth. Through 56 public–private partnerships and farmer-led cooperatives, concerted efforts are underway to ensure improved varieties reach communities faster.

Across the project’s countries, 24 multi-stakeholder Innovation Platforms (IPs) have been established to connect farmers, researchers, processors, millers, and private-sector actors in collaborative learning and technology exchange. These platforms serve as hubs for demonstration, seed production, value addition, and enterprise development, creating jobs and opportunities for women and youth. So far, 17,715 farmers, 7,487 of whom are women, have joined these platforms across Ethiopia, Mali, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania. In Zimbabwe alone, nearly 10,000 farmers, more than half of them women, are working through five irrigation schemes adopted to improved varieties, share local innovations, and co-create profitable wheat-based enterprises.

Youth Leading Zimbabwe’s Wheat Future

The impact of the training was immediate and inspiring. The school tuck shop now sells a range of wheat-based snacks, generating income while giving students hands-on experience in agribusiness. Farmers and parents have begun experimenting with new wheat varieties and products, while innovation platforms are connecting breeders, millers, processors, and private-sector actors to sustain momentum across the value chain.

For ICARDA and TAAT, this initiative exemplifies the power of research partnerships to translate improved technologies into community-led solutions. By engaging schools as innovation hubs, Zimbabwe is cultivating not only crops but also a new generation of agri-entrepreneurs ready to transform Africa’s food systems.

As one student put it:

“We came to learn how to bake bread. We’re leaving knowing how to build businesses.”