History
The Njeremoto Biodiversity Institute (NBI) was established on 11th November 2004 as a non-profit organization with a mandate to facilitate Sustainable Time Controlled Grazing in Arid and Semi-arid Rangelands Ecosystems. It works and learns together with Smallholder Rural Communities, in Zimbabwe, SADC Region, Africa, and internationally to manage humanity’s livelihoods and resources holistically so that it can improve our lives both now and for our future generations. Currently, it is located 54 km north of Masvingo City along the Beitbridge-Masvingo-Harare Highway, in Chatsworth Area, in Masvingo Province of Zimbabwe (GPS coordinates S19o35.80’, E 30o46.21’,).
The Best Agricultural Biodiversity
ECO-Friendly Enviroments can be Made from Scratch
What They Say
"Working alongside Njeremoto Biodiversity has truly been a privilege for all of us. Their dedication to biodiversity conservation and sustainable livelihoods is unmatched."
"The HLLM training we received has changed our farming practices completely. We now understand how to work with nature rather than against it."
"The holistic approach to landscape management has greatly improved our crop yields, strengthened our grazing areas, and fully restored balance to our environment."
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PRINCIPLES
- Bring back nature principle: Enhancing the health of the ecosystems and respect of nature as a basis for sustainable livelihoods.
- Always promoting and improving effective teamwork in our work with committees, other stakeholder and amongst ourselves. Team work ensures that everyone is involved, everyone is aware of what is happening, all have same vision ie driving to the same destination, all have share the same values as well as respect each other’s views and always enhances participatory methodologies and approaches.
- Accountable &Transparent Principle/Seeing and conveying things as they really are without fear of failure
- Innovative and Creative Principle: Keep looking for and trying out new ways of doing things.
- Plan/Monitor/Control/Re-plan Principle: Continually checking progress and learning from our experiences
- Research and Documentation Principle: Ensure a variety of evidence to illustrate the impact of our work
Contribution to Sustainable Farming Systems (SFS) Objective
Raise awareness of the need to shift to more sustainable food systems and to apply a holistic, systems approach to addressing food security and nutrition.
Build capacity and enabling conditions for the identification, prioritization, development and uptake of sustainable practices across food systems and facilitate access to financial and technical assistance.
Take stock of, categorize and disseminate – and if needed develop – accessible and actionable science-based and/or empirically demonstrated information tools and methodologies to support governments, the private sector, farmers, consumers and other relevant stakeholders to contribute to more sustainable food systems.
Bring together initiatives and develop partnerships to build synergies and cooperation to leverage resources towards the mutual goal of promoting, enhancing and facilitating the shift towards more sustainable food systems
BRIEF BACKGROUND
The HLLM project evolving at Njeremoto Biodiversity is demonstrating the Indigenous Shona Knowledge on Grazing and Land Management. In the Shona culture, the land evolved with herding animals. Hence the absence of one results in the destruction of the other.
The conventional grazing management belief that too many animals result in overgrazing is a misconception of the semi-arid savanna environments of Southern Africa where these environments evolved with thousands of herding grazers such as wildebeests and buffalo. The Shona believe that overgrazing is caused by inadequate recovery period for grazed plants. Further, they believe that in conventional western grazing management practice, overgrazing is a result of domesticated animals overstaying on the same piece of land (continuous grazing) or returning too soon to the grazed area (rapid rotational grazing systems).
Opportunity existed on vast areas of degraded land to utilize animals (domestic and wildlife) to heal the land, improve water cycles and build biodiversity, while enhancing food security, reducing poverty, and establish ecological stability at a landscape scale hence positively changing peoples’ life.
This project is exploring and evolving new technology for semi-arid rangelands management as well as empowering and capacitating the humans with skills and tools to sustainably manage the ecosystem while ensuring sustainable livelihoods for the present and future generations.
"Njeremoto Biodiversity has truly transformed our community. Through the HLLM program, we gained practical conservation knowledge that changed how we manage our land."