Field Notes

Across three community sites in the Lower Kafue, we are documenting cases where Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration is spreading without formal incentive structures. What is driving it — and what does it mean for programme design? This note explores early field observations and their implications for how we think about conservation incentives.

GIS dashboards. SMS platforms. Data collection apps. We are finding a consistent pattern in the literature and in the field: tools that work beautifully in pilots but disappear within two years of the project ending. This note takes a preliminary look at the institutional conditions that determine whether a digital tool becomes infrastructure — or a dead link.

As traditional ODA flows shift and NGO budgets tighten across Southern Africa, the Kafue Water Fund offers a rare live case study in building conservation finance from landscape value. This note reflects on what we are learning in year one about the gap between theory and practice in environmental finance instrument design.

We have begun documenting the incentive structures across five Nature-based Solution programmes operating in the Kafue catchment — from check dam construction to rangeland management. The variation is striking. This note maps what we have found so far and introduces a preliminary typology for comparative analysis.

SMS-based agricultural advisory systems have been deployed across Zambia for over a decade. We are now seeing the emergence of AI-assisted equivalents via WhatsApp and IVR. This note reviews what the evidence says about uptake, accuracy, and trust — and what our early field conversations are adding to that picture.

Green bonds have been issued for conservation projects across Latin America and East Africa. Zambia's environmental finance infrastructure is nascent by comparison. This note considers the governance, measurement, and policy preconditions that would need to be in place — and how far away from them we currently are.