TŌTĀRA AFRICA · ZAMBIA
Tōtāra is a Zambian-registered organisation delivering strategic advisory, applied research and programme implementation across Southern Africa — in climate change and resilience, agriculture and food systems, and health systems.
We are led and based in Zambia, and we bring international technical expertise directly into the programmes it serves — no distant head office, no overhead consuming the budget before it reaches delivery, and no substitute for local expertise.
01
Adaptation and resilience programming for the communities and systems most exposed to a changing climate — and the frame through which we approach agriculture and health.
02
Applied remote sensing and data tools that make agricultural risk visible and decisions better — bringing academic methodology directly into operational settings.
03
A systems partner rather than another implementer: implementation quality, community-to-system linkage, and the systems that determine whether health investments last.
WHY THESE THREE
One chain, not three sectors
Drought changes what people eat, what they earn, where they live, and which diseases they encounter. Climate, agriculture and health are not three separate sectors we happen to work in — they are three points on the same causal chain, and what sits at the end of it is human wellbeing.
We work across that chain deliberately, because interventions designed for one point on it routinely fail at another. And two things determine whether anything on that chain holds: whether people adopt and sustain what a programme offers, and whether proven approaches survive past the funding cycle that paid for them. Those are our two cross-cutting capabilities — social and behavioural change, and implementation.
Programmes at every point on the chain fail in the same place — not in their design, but in whether people take them up.
A climate adaptation measure only reduces risk if households adopt it. A yield model only improves a farmer’s position if lenders and farmers act on what it tells them. A health service only improves outcomes if people reach it before they are seriously ill — and contact with the health system is regular in the first five years of life through immunisation schedules, then becomes episodic and illness-driven. Preventive health-seeking remains uncommon.
That is why we treat social and behavioural change as a core technical capability that shapes design, implementation and evaluation across all three sectors — not as a communications component added once a programme is built.
It is also the point where the chain either delivers or doesn’t. Climate, agriculture and health connect through the systems people actually live in, and behaviour is where those systems either improve someone’s wellbeing or fail to.
Our defining capability. We connect international academic and technical expertise to in-country delivery — and ensure that what is learned in the field flows back into the research. Our formal partnership with the University of Auckland puts advanced remote sensing methodology directly into operational decision-making.
We build and hold together the partnerships that complex programmes require — across government, universities, donors, local consortia and the private sector. Within months of incorporation we assembled research, implementation and delivery partners across two programme areas.
Detailed founding Articles, a not-for-profit corporate structure, a practising lawyer as Company Secretary, and an Advisory Council providing independent technical oversight. Built in from inception, not retrofitted for a funding round.
Programme design, proposal development and donor strategy informed by senior experience inside humanitarian and multilateral funding institutions — including from the donor side of the table.
A live pilot with Good Nature Agro applying satellite-based yield estimation to smallholder maize fields as an input to their credit scoring framework. Tōtāra provides in-country presence, implementation coordination and the bridge between academic research and field application; the University of Auckland provides the remote sensing expertise. The objective is to improve credit risk assessment and reduce reliance on costly field-based estimates.
We work with governments, universities, donors, philanthropic funders, local consortia and private-sector partners. If you’re building something in this space, we’d like to hear from you.
Contact Tōtāra