Jean Muuzu lives in the Mazabuka’s Dumba area in Zambia. She is fifty-two years old, divorced and has three children in the age between thirty-two and twenty-two years. The youngest one is still living together with her. He is not married, has finished college and is assisting her on the farm. The other two children are living elsewhere.
Jean has six hectares of land of which five are under production: one with cotton, two hectares of maize, half a hectare with groundnuts, half a hectare with cowpeas and one hectare with sweet potatoes. She owns fifteen cows, of which at the moment four are producing milk. She has between fifty and hundred broilers, depending on how much she buys. The broilers, chickens bred and raised for meat production, provide her a good regular income, because she can sell them every six weeks.
Jean does bookkeeping only for the broilers. She buys part of the feed for the broilers, the other part she grows herself. The one-day chickens she buys at Mazabuku and sells the broilers also in her neighbourhood.
Jean is member of a study circle group of the Cotton Association of Zambia and member of the Magoye Dairy Cooperative. Through both organisations she received training in bookkeeping, agricultural and livestock practices. She uses the manure of the cows for the agricultural production and feeds the animals with cotton cakes. Those practices she has learned from the study books in her local language provided to her in the study circle group. She has learned by putting the new methods in practice.
