Our 2025 operations marked a shift towards scaled, community-led resilience across Zambia, driven by our mission to lift families out of poverty and guide them into the abundant life God intends for them. Despite severe macroeconomic challenges, including sharp exchange rate fluctuations and a tight budgetary environment, our team faithfully extended its reach into eight provinces. The transition to a more efficient operational model increased the number of communities managed per trainer. This dedication allowed us to welcome and engage 6,356 households across 161 communities, achieving nearly 90% of our annual target as we work together to restore hope.
Holistic Transformation: The FARM STEW Recipe
True self-reliance requires a compassionate, comprehensive approach to household health, faith, and economics. Throughout the year, our dedicated network of 151 part-time volunteers and trainers poured into their local areas, delivering vital education focused on nutrition, sanitation, and sustainable agriculture ingrained in Christian values.
- Fighting Hunger and Malnutrition: We provided hands-on training in organic kitchen gardening, soil mulching, and composting to 5,586 households; empowering them to grow their own food. Nutrition modules emphasising the beauty of God’s colourful “rainbow meals” brought health back to families, leading to a decline in childhood malnutrition rates, particularly within our Northern circuit.
- Disease Prevention and Sanitation: Cleanliness education blossomed into widespread, healthy behavioral changes. Communities came together to construct essential sanitation tools, including tippy-tap handwashing stations, rubbish pits, and ventilated latrines, which directly protected families and reduced waterborne diseases.
Climate Resilience and Innovation
A prolonged drought across the southern regions of the country brought heavy challenges, highlighting critical vulnerabilities in local water access. Water scarcity became a concerning bottleneck, forcing families to make the difficult choice between using water to cook a basic meal or using it to sustain their gardens. This deeply impacted our strict home-certification process, with 812 resilient households across 10 communities fully achieving certified status this year.
To counter these climate realities and better serve our communities, we focused heavily on practical, structural innovations:
- Water Security: We praise God for the release of a donated Village Drill, which was successfully cleared through complex tax-exemption channels after a long delay. A trained crew will deploy this equipment in the coming months, bringing life-giving, perennial water access to our certified communities.
- Crop Diversification: In areas traditionally reliant on mono-cropped cassava and over-exploited fisheries, we introduced a larger hectarage of nourishing, climate-resilient crops, including soybeans, red and white sorghum, millet, and cowpeas to secure food for the vulnerable.
- Alternative Income Enterprises: We consolidated our beekeeping initiatives into a centralised apiary designed to house 200 hives, boosting local honey production and providing a sustainable source of income to uplift the community.
Expanding Our Borders
Our grassroots footprint expanded beyond Zambia this year as we sought to share the message of an abundant life with more of God’s children. Locally, our hearts turned toward deeper inclusion by launching targeted training programs for blind and handicapped households who were eking out a living without government support. Regionally, we initiated our very first ‘Training of Trainers’ program in Botswana, equipping eight new planters to bring hope, health, and sobriety to vulnerable settlements struggling with poverty and substance abuse.
Wilderness Gate also had the privilege of presenting its Christian poverty alleviation models to the Ministry responsible for NGOs. This presentation resulted in an invitation to sign a formal Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), which is currently in circulation. This partnership will allow us to train government community development employees in the FARM STEW curriculum, institutionalising our approach to sustainable development and national transformation.
As we look toward 2026, our focus remains on establishing a localised Training School to deliver instruction in native languages. This will ensure that our trainers can clearly communicate the gospel and the practical tools of health; turning the seeds of self-reliance sown this year into a permanent, abundant harvest across the nation.
