This is a story about Ruth Stephen Chileshe who lives in a remote rural farming community outside the northern capital of Kasama.

For the past few years, farmers and villagers have battled extreme poverty and malnutrition due to low crop yields brought about by difficulties in tilling the land, depleted soils and deforestation.

The community is highly reliant on smallholder agriculture and grows crops such as maize, cassava and beans – staples in the Zambian diet. However,  the high cost of farming inputs (fertilizers and seeds), and the lack of farming tools and machinery such as tractors, means that the majority of farmers cannot afford to cultivate large areas of land.

Since farming by hand is so arduous, Chileshe and her fellow farmers resorted to the timeless tradition of chitemene – slash and burn agriculture – to quickly clear the land. This led to deforestation and poor soil quality, hampering local food production and putting an already hungry community into peril.