What’s New?

Good News from MIGHTi - A Fabulous Year in Review

We all need some good news, and MIGHTi has much to share. Since our last update in 2025, we have made remarkable progress. This spring, a team from Colorado State University visited Zambia to support nutrition education, women’s health, and our expanding rural Innovation Hub. We broke ground on a women’s shop, build a culinary mushroom farm, and installed a solar water pump, all while continuing our adult literacy and community building programs and demonstrating regenerative agriculture practices. It wouldn’t be possible without your support.

  • Thanks to a 4W Innovation Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, MIGHTi is building a novel women’s shop on our farm and evaluate its community impact. Lack of access to menstrual hygiene products and sanitation is a primary barrier to girls finishing school and women participating equally in the workforce. There is currently nowhere in Mungu village to buy basic menstrual products consistently, and the nearest retailers are 3-5 km away. Our shop will meet this need, provide a wide variety of products at affordable prices, offer a safe space for women to gather and receive training on women’s health issues, and for the first time, give women in Mungu the dignity of choice when it comes to menstrual products. 

  • In March 2025, MIGHTi, along with collaborators from Colorado State University, received funding to support a two-year project to establish a culinary mushroom farm. Mushrooms are highly desirable in Zambia, but almost exclusively wild-harvested during a short rainy season. With this project, we will enable year-round production of nutritionally and financially valuable mushrooms for the Mungu community. The project facilitates the construction of an operational mushroom farm, the development of a rural lab to ensure safe products, advancement of new rural food preservation techniques, and training women as mushroom-growing experts. MIGHTi women will build valuable skills in mushroom cultivation, food preservation, leadership, and nutrition, while benefiting from increased food access. To ensure sustainability and extend food access year-round, we have constructed a rainwater collection system, solar dryers for mushroom preservation, and a solar-powered rural laboratory (specifically to enable the generation of clean mushroom spawn). 

  • With support from MIGHTi intern Morgan Medina, we are in the process of creating a Zambian food and crop atlas to highlight the unique properties, uses, nutritional value, and beliefs surrounding traditional and popular Zambian foods. The atlas will be a fascinating introduction to Zambian cuisine. Completed within the year, we plan to make the atlas accessible to the public with the intent that the funds accumulated from sales will be put back into MIGHTi to support agriculture and nutrition work.

Field Visit Highlights from CSU

In April, MIGHTi Vice President, Dr. Brittney Sly and three students from Colorado State University, worked alongside our Zambian partners to better understand the needs and priorities of women and families in the Mungu community. Twenty women participated in household assessments on diet diversity, food security, and perceptions of mushrooms as a nutritious food source. A focus group with 32 women provided deeper insight into menstrual health, barriers to accessing nutritious food, and the everyday challenges the community faces.

The team also led a hands-on workshop focused on nutrition for women and children, WASH (water, sanitation, hygiene), food safety, and fermented foods. The MIGHTi community prepared meals together, sharing both Zambian and American recipes.

Fermented foods (including yogurt, picked vegetables, and sauerkraut) were a major hit, with many excited to share the food with families, and enthusiastic about the foods’ value as nutritious, self-stable foods in communities where refrigeration is limited.

Perhaps the strongest take-home message from the visit was interconnectedness. Before we can fully address health, MIGHTi must look at economic opportunity. Many women expressed a desire for practical income-generating skills, such as sewing, emphasizing that financial stability is needed before they can focus on making meaningful improvements in health and nutrition. MIGHTi has taken these messages to heart.

The Last Year in Review

  • Land Development

    The MIGHTi Farm continues to evolve as a local center for innovation to support food security and women’s empowerment. Following a severe storm and unfortunate vandalism event earlier this year, MIGHTi increased investment in climate-smart infrastructure and hired an experienced farm manager to oversee daily operations and enhance security. We also  installed a solar-powered borehole to provide uninterrupted running water, which is a game changer for accelerating year-round crop production, construction projects, and support for on-farm training events. 

    In April, the farm harvested its traditional maize crop grown using the three-sisters companion planting model, and planted sweet potatoes, cassava, red okra, long beans, and native glass maize. Approximately 100 banana trees have also been added to the MIGHTi orchard and are thriving, with plans to double that number by the end of the year.

  • Community Garden Initiative

    The new Community Garden Initiative began this year with families assigned individual plots to learn organic and climate-smart farming methods that reduce dependence on resource-intensive and costly chemical fertilizers and pesticides while improving household food security.

  • Adult Literacy

    MIGHTi continues to support adult literacy through weekly classes. Currently, 30+ local women are enrolled, many with the goal of passing government exams and proceeding to more advanced levels. Proof of passing government exams opens up countless new opportunities. Our program has been on-going since 2023 and takes place at a nearby primary school (until we have our own facility). Head teacher, Lungowe Malundu, continues to inspire the students with engaging learning activities and songs, along with regular encouragement. 

  • Initial progress on the women's shop, including storage, an office, sales room, and back open veranda where a tea shop for gathering and workshops will be installed

    MIGHTi Women's Shop

    Brick by brick, the MIGHTi Women’s shop is nearly complete and will soon provide rural women easy access to essential menstrual hygiene products along with new entrepreneurial opportunities. There is currently nowhere to buy these items in Mungu village, leaving women and girls reliant on unsanitary options or expensive trips to the nearest town (about 5 km away). Lack of access to menstrual hygiene products, known as menstrual poverty, pushes girls out of school, reinforces negative taboos, and keeps women from active workforce participation.

    The MIGHTi shop will stock a variety of reusable menstrual products at a subsidized price to help address the stress and isolation of menstrual poverty. Our model will ensure women have greater choice, dignity, and access to affordable supplies. Fresh fruits and vegetables from our farm, as well as  household items, cold drinks, and locally sourced goods will also be sold. In the future, we plan to stock handcrafted soaps and lotions made by the MIGHTi women  rom locally sourced ingredients, such as moringa and neem. 

    As a working Innovation Hub, our farm and shop also serve as a training center where women can develop practical skills. Planned workshops for the next year include sewing and design, making sanitary pads, and creating household goods such as curtains, placemats, coasters, bedsheets, and aprons. A long-term vision is to introduce textile printing using natural dyes from plants grown on the farm. Products will be sold onsite, through local markets in Kafue, Lusaka, and beyond.

  • Mushrooms - Oh My!

    Construction of MIGHTi’s culimary mushroom grow house is nearly complete, equipped with solar-powered climate-control systems, shelving, and an adjacent water supply. A new access road and water tank now support year-round mushroom production, which will diversify diets and generate income. 

    Our partners at Colorado State University have experimented with growing mushrooms on corn stover and are finalizing a training manual for local growers. Upcoming workshops will focus on culinary oyster mushrooms to equip women with the skills needed to grow them at the farm and in their own households. MIGHTi is actively engaging with local supermarkets and market vendors in Lusaka to establish a reliable  local sales channel with a long-term vision of exporting to regional and broader markets.  With the ability to now transform mushrooms from a short-season wild food to a sustainable year-round resource, this project will diversify diet, improve nutrition, and create new income opportunities for MIGHTi women.

    CSU engineering students worked with MIGHTi to design and construct a first-of-its kind solar-powered pasteurization system for use on our mushroom farm. We will be farming mushrooms off the grid! They system will be tested, adjusted, and shipped to Zambia for us within the next 4 months.

Announcing Our New Programs

  • Born out of a desire for safe, women-only spaces, Spill the Tea is a brand new weekly gathering at the MIGHTi women's shop that fosters conversation, planning, and support. Participants discuss personal goals, future aspirations, business ideas, and challenges affecting their communities while drinking tea. Conversations have tackled difficult topics, such as gender-based violence, child protection, and women’s rights. The group is identifying solutions to bring to local leaders and advocating for stronger protections for women. In partnership with the Ministry of Community Development, the MIGHTi women aim to join the Child Protection Working Group to become trained in identifying, reporting, and responding to cases of child abuse. Spill the Tea weekly sessions are healing and inspiring for participants. 

  • MIGHTi recently launched its first village banking project to help women build savings, access capital, and grow their businesses. Through this model, members contribute regularly to a self-managed community fund. Participants can borrow from the fund to invest in small businesses, agricultural activities, household improvements, or other income-generating projects, repaying loans with a modest interest rate that grows the group’s collective savings.  At the end of each cycle, members receive a share of the fund based on their contributions. Village banking programs in neighboring communities have been successful, with individuals purchasing land, expanding businesses, building homes, and strengthening household financial stability. MIGHTi is excited to bring these same opportunities to the women in Mungu.

Director Spotlight: A Message from Mwansa

From Research Project to Rural Innovation Hub: MIGHTi's Powerful Evolution

Dear MIGHTi Supporters:
We've come a long way as an organization. MIGHTi, which began as a research project focused on alternative proteins, has put women at the center of our work from the very beginning. Rural women are often an overlooked and marginalized group, in Zambian society. We wanted to ensure we were bringing them into the fold. As we built trust with the community, requests from rural women about how MIGHTi could be more than a research project emerged.

We never imagined the women would love MIGHTi so much or want to see what more we could build together. That’s what inspired us to shift our focus to innovation and change-making: working to create a safe space where rural women can innovate, experiment, express themselves, be heard, share ideas, and know they will never be ridiculed, judged, or told they cannot achieve something. We wanted to give them a space where they could try, fail, and maybe even try again, and this time get it right. That’s what the MIGHTi Farm is all about. 

In 2026, it is so exciting to have almost completed the Women’s Shop because one of the most important lessons from our research on menstrual poverty was that access is about more than products; it’s about dignity, choice, and participation. Most women don’t have access to menstrual products and many have resorted to using traditional cloth, not because that is what they want, but because that is all that is available to them. This has limited their ability to fully participate in daily life; they can’t attend events, go to work, and many girls skip school. Through the MIGHTi Women’s Shop, we aim to ensure women and girls have access to a wide range of affordable menstrual products, meeting their diverse needs and preferences… and because we want women in our community to have the same choices as anyone else. We also plan to create local economic opportunities by producing reusable pads, soaps, and lotions at the farm using locally sourced ingredients. 

Education continues to be another priority for MIGHTi. The enthusiasm for our next adult literacy cohort has been incredible, and our goal is to go beyond basic reading and writing by helping learners prepare for government examinations. These exams are expensive, which is a deterrent for many. But we are passionate about empowering women to read and giving women a  second chance to actually finish their education. Many of the women in our literacy classes never had the opportunity to finish school because their education simply wasn’t valued or accessible. MIGHTi  is changing the narrative; we can support women to complete grade 12, which opens new previously inaccessible  opportunities, including local colleges and scholarship support through the local Community Development Fund.

In April, we also launched Spill the Tea, a weekly gathering where women discuss topics that are often kept silent, including gender-based violence. These conversations have given space for women to share their experiences, and many have described how violence arises from when they speak up, express opinions, or vocalize disagreement. Spill the Tea is not about mere discussions; it is about developing practical strategies on how we can bring these issues to community leaders and government officials to create a safer environment for everyone in our society. 

The MIGHTi farm is much more than land. It is becoming an innovation hub where women can learn, rural women. What began as five hectares of possibility is steadily transforming into an innovation hub where women can learn, become entrepreneurs, and build sustainable livelihoods. From mushroom production and community gardens to literacy, and village banking, every project is designed to strengthen food security, generate income, and empower women to shape their own futures. Our long-term vision is to build community-led enterprises rooted in regenerative agriculture and local innovation. Through climate-smart farming, sewing and design, locally produced wellness products, and sustainable agriculture, women are gaining the skills and resources to create lasting economic opportunities while protecting the land for generations to come. 

Every building, garden, literacy class, and new enterprise reminds us what is possible when communities are trusted, heard, and supported. We still have much to build, but thanks to our partners, donors, and the women who inspire this work every day, we are steadily turning vision into reality. We thank you for your support!

Be part of the change. Invest in women-driven change for people and the planet!

Despite devastating news regarding the closure of important programs in Zambia (and globally) and the exceedingly difficult funding environment, our team perseveres. 

To keep MIGHTi afloat, retain our local staff, and build critical infrastructure, we still need your help.Please donate to support development of: a composting latrine, solar panels, and a covered building for training workshops and gatherings.These material items are the hardest to fundraise for, but also essential for our success. Please consider supporting MIGHTi by becoming a sustaining monthly donor. Even $10 or $25.00 per month goes a long way in keeping our day-to-day activities running smoothly. More information about how to sign-up for recurring donations or to donate once can be found HERE.

Thank you to all that have donated in the past. MIGHTi’s innovative model for sustainable development can truly make a difference–and you can be part of the change!

MIGHTi Inc is a registered 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit organization (EIN: 88-2897677).

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