Working where farming has the most untapped potential

As one of Ireland’s leading non-government organisations (NGOs), the charity harnesses the potential of Africa’s small-holder farmers to drive economic advancement, believing agriculture is the most effective way to lift millions of families out of extreme poverty. In a region of the world where the vast majority of food is produced on small farms, it’s a compelling story of promise and potential.
Self Help Africa works where poverty is most concentrated, but where farming has the most untapped potential. At least 80 per cent of Africa’s 33 million small farms have the potential to produce a lot more than they do at present. With better access to training and information, better quality seed, improved soil health, fertiliser, water and irrigation, and more effective handling of crops after harvest, this ‘yield gap’ between what is being grown and what is possible can be closed.
Self Help Africa’s story is about the small-holder farming families who are responding to this challenge. But it’s also the story of an organisation that has harnessed the potential of strategic partnerships and mergers to grow into one of Europe’s leading agriculture NGOs. I saw both of these elements firsthand when I visited two of Self Help Africa’s biggest programme countries, Malawi and Zambia, in the months after I joined the organisation in January this year. Before joining Self Help Africa I had worked in the NGO sector in the Middle and Far East, but had been back in Ireland for a number of years, working with the RDS Foundation and its historical programmes in agriculture and rural affairs, as well as in enterprise, the arts and science for development, when this exciting opportunity arose. I knew the work of Self Help Africa before I applied for the role. I knew that within the overseas charity sector it had carved a niche as a specialist farming development organisation. It was the long-standing charity of choice of the Irish Farmers' Association (IFA) and also enjoyed a strong funding relationship with Irish Aid, which has backed the organisation’s development programmes in Africa for close to a quarter of a century.

Origin

Self Help Africa’s largest footprint in 2026 is in both Zambia and Malawi, two neighbouring southern African countries where the ravages of a changing climate have made it increasingly difficult to produce the food that families need to survive. However, the charity’s origins can be traced to Ethiopia and the famine that devastated the Horn of Africa in the 1980s. At that time, a Carlow-born priest based in Ethiopia, Father Owen Lambert, spoke about the tragic famine, and began advocating a response that centred on small-scale farmers. I was very fortunate to meet him recently.
The Ethiopian famine of 1984-85 was a humanitarian catastrophe that claimed the lives of more than one million people, and was seared into public consciousness by both the BBC news reports of Michael Buerk, and by the subsequent actions of outspoken Dubliner, Bob Geldof, whose Band Aid and Live Aid events broke the mould for both charity fundraising and campaign-awareness-raising in that era.
Self Help Development International was born out of that crisis. Its emergence was assisted by Bob Geldof, whose Band Aid Trust provided nearly one million pounds to the newly formed charity to invest in agricultural projects, including an IFA-backed initiative that shipped thousands of tonnes of Cara Irish seed potatoes to famine-affected regions of Ethiopia.

Mergers

Self Help Africa’s subsequent growth was underpinned by a number of mergers and collaborations, several of which were tied to the organisation’s work in Zambia and Malawi. In 2008, Self Help Development merged with a small UK-based agricultural charity, Harvest Help, to create Self Help Africa. Harvest Help had been formed in the late 1970s to support some of Zambia’s poorest communities, who were living in Gwembe Valley in the country’s far south. One of the country’s driest areas, its poverty levels are not an accident of geography. The extreme poverty in Gwembe is linked to the forcible displacement of tens of thousands of people from their land during the 1950s construction of the Kariba Dam, which created the world’s largest man-made reservoir, Lake Kariba.
I visited several communities where displaced people had been pushed onto marginal land and, generations later, were still struggling to make ends meet. In villages where Self Help Africa works today, I saw how the focus of activities was now on supporting poor rural households to adapt to a newer challenge posed by a changing climate.
Recognised to be one of the most drought-prone and climate-vulnerable sub-regions in Southern Africa, Gwembe Valley today records an average yearly rainfall of between 60 and 80 centimetres, which is around half the rainfall experienced by other parts of the country. Self Help Africa is promoting a range of simple but effective activities to improve soil fertility, including the use of natural compost and manure, and is promoting ‘climate smart’ farming approaches specifically designed to help the soil to retain scarce moisture. These approaches include zero-tillage farming that avoids ploughing fields, which dries the earth, and the retention of stubble and crop residues, to shade the land from the direct rays of the baking sun. On my visit, I saw how climate resilient seed varieties were being made available to farmers, along with alternate crop varieties to maize (corn), such as millet, sorghum, groundnut and cassava.
Self Help Africa’s head of programmes in Zambia, Danny Lemba, explained that the south of the country had endured successive years of water shortages and that maize, which didn’t cope well with hot and dry conditions, had experienced declining yields. In one year the crop had failed entirely, he said. Irrigation and early maturing varieties of maize had been introduced to help production, but in a substantial proportion of cases, maize alternatives were performing better for farmers. “It is the way forward,” he told me.

Malawi

In neighbouring Malawi, I had the opportunity to see the results of Self Help Africa’s more recent merger with UK-based charity United Purpose, which took place in 2021. Originally called Concern Universal, United Purpose had been founded in the UK in the mid-1970s by Father Raymond Kennedy as a sister organisation to the well-known Dublin-based, Concern Worldwide, of which Father Kennedy had been a co-founder a decade earlier. Concern Universal/United Purpose, like Self Help Africa, had been working on agriculture and other poverty eradication projects in rural Malawi for close to 30 years. The merger of the two entities united a large portfolio of projects in Malawi. On my visit I saw various different aspects of this work – including solar mini-grids that had been established in a number of villages, fuel-efficient cook-stoves that were being manufactured and sold by women’s groups, clean water and sanitation projects, and support being provided to communities affected by destructive weather events that had hit Malawi in recent years. This included tropical cyclone Freddy, which displaced over 600,000 people in 2023, and cyclone Jude, which made tens of thousands homeless in 2025.

Gorta

Self Help Africa’s history of unifications runs deeper than just these examples, however. Perhaps the most significant and consequential amalgamation in a long history of mergers came just over a decade ago, when Self Help joined forces with Gorta, Ireland’s first overseas development charity. Gorta was created by the Department of Agriculture in 1965 as Ireland’s member of the United Nations Freedom from Hunger Council and was also grounded in food and farming. Over several decades, its work reached more than 50 countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas. It forged strong links with Teagasc to send Irish farm advisors on secondment to countries around the world to support the work of local partners.

Reflections

As I reflect upon my first visits to sub-Saharan Africa as the CEO of Self Help Africa, I think about the value and real-life impact that the work I saw is having on the people I met on my journey. Edith, for example, is making a living and is sending her children to school thanks to the income that she is making from the sale of fuel stoves in Malawi. Daniel and Albert are processing maize and rice at a mill powered by a solar mini-grid in Dedza District, Malawi. And the villagers in Gwembe, Zambia spoke about their increased harvests. Importantly, I saw communities speaking with pride about how they were part of the solution and how they established committees to ensure critical work, such as water management, drying and storing fruit and vegetables helped the whole village to thrive. They are all testimony to the importance of this work.
At a time when many governments across the globe – including the US, France, Great Britain, Germany, The Netherlands and Japan – have made huge cuts to their spending on international development aid, the continuing support of the general public in Ireland and of Irish Aid for this work are more important than ever. In 2026, that backing, and the support of others, is allowing Self Help Africa to reach more than six million people and making it possible for some of the most vulnerable people, with whom we share our world, to make real and positive changes to their lives.