One afternoon in Mupindi village, Gokwe South, more than 400km from Zimbabwe’s capital Harare, a smallholder farmer called Bernard Mupindi is pruning the rough, hairy triangular leaves that grow around the stem of a sunflower. The blooming yellow sunflowers in this 3,5-hectare piece of land are less than a month away from harvest. Mupindi still recalls that growing sunflowers for his family to eat around a decade ago, but he had no idea how quickly that would change. Little did he know that growing sunflowers would soon serve to counter the effects of climate change. “I used to grow cotton, maize as well as sunflower on a small piece of land. Back then we used to have better rains in this area,” he explains. “For the past five years, we've been having a series of heatwaves. Maize and cotton farming became unproductive. So, I had to try drought-resilient crops such as sunflower.” Other drought-resilient crops that Mupindi grows include groundnuts, bambaranuts, millet and sorghum. The father of three received training on drought-resilient crops farming in October 2019, which proved essential to his business today. He says he was taught at the Agricultural Business Center (ABC) in Gokwe, which uses a pro-business investment approach to help smallholder farmers have high income-generating potential. ABC is a European Union-funded project which is being implemented by German charity, Welthungerhilfe (WHH) with support from Empretec Zimbabwe, a capacity-building programme of the United Nations’ (UN) trade agency UNCTAD. Mupindi’s wife Alleta Muzenda was also part of ABC’s capacity-building training programme in October. She explains how it helped them to earn a living through sunflower farming. “I can pay fees for my children and buy food for the family,” she says. At the end of 2020, the UN World Food Programme estimated that the number of food-insecure Zimbabweans was up to 8,6 million people — a staggering 60% of the population. A combination of factors are to blame. Zimbabwe is experiencing its worst economic crisis in decades with a three-figure inflation rate, leading to an increase in the cost of living. The prices of basic commodities including maize, the staple cereal, have gone beyond the reach of many. For the past five years, lack of rain leading to drought has been hitting subsistence farmers like Mupindi’s family hard. These farmers account for three-quarters of Zimbabwe’s population. The southern African nation, which was once the breadbasket of the continent, will import an estimated 1,1 million tonnes of grain in the 2020/2021 marketing year to meet demand, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. But the power of the sunflower and other drought-resilient crops is that they can survive the dry spell for a month, says another smallholder farmer in Gokwe South, Savirios Chingura. Other crops like maize, however, cannot go for two weeks without adequate water. In the fragile Zimbabwean economy, farmers struggle to buy inputs, but with sunflower and other drought-resilient crops, they can still h