The recent climate change disasters have denied more than 5000 farmers from five corporative farming groups a chance to start benefiting from irrigation farming from next year under Shire Valley Transformation Program (SVTP).

This was revealed when President Lazarus Chakwera inspected the project on Wednesday in Chikwawa district.

SVTP is a program aimed at providing access to reliable gravity fed irrigation and drainage services, secure land tenure for smallholder farmers and strengthened management of wetlands and protected areas.

This is a 14-year program (2018-2031) which will be implemented in three sequential but partially overlapping phases.

Project coordinator for the program, Dr Stanley Khaira, said the targeted farmers were supposed to start benefiting from the project by 2023 but climate change effects have derailed the plans to 2024.

He said more than 5000 farmers from five farmers corporative are being trained in irrigation farming skills.

Dr Khaira said: “We had intended that these farmers should start getting irrigation water in 2023 but because of the damage at intake, now they will start getting water in 2024.”

However, Dr. Khaira said they have already started training the farmers in irrigation farming skills.

According to Dr. Khaira, SVTP will irrigate approximately 43,370 hectares of land by abstracting water from the Shire River at Kapichira dam and conveying it by gravity to the irrigable areas in Chikwawa and Nsanje districts through canals.

“In overall the SVTP will cover a total distance of about 133kms from the intake at Kapichira dam to Bangula in Nsanje,” he said.

The funding for the project came from Malawi government (US$7.2m), World Bank (US$160m) and Africa Development Bank (US$50m).

Apart from inspecting Shire Valley Transformation Program, president Chakwera also visited Kapichira Power Station and Illovo Sugar Estate before addressing a rally at Nsangwe community ground in the area of traditional authorization Ngabu.