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Research

COMACO (Community Markets for Conservation)

Todd Manwaring

on Sep 23, 2026

• 10 min read

Our Recommendation

COMACO (Community Markets for Conservation) is one of the most sophisticated and rigorously evaluated integrated conservation-development enterprises in Africa. Its model is genuinely distinctive. Rather than choosing between conservation and poverty alleviation, COMACO has built a self-reinforcing loop in which market incentives drive conservation compliance, conservation compliance improves soil and ecosystem health, ecosystem health improves farming productivity, and improved productivity deepens farmer commitment to conservation. Over 23 years of operation across nearly a quarter of Zambia, now reaching 472,804 farmers, or roughly 340,000 household families across 84 chiefdoms, COMACO has produced some of the most compelling evidence in the conservation-development field.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study comparing COMACO and non-COMACO areas found stabilized wildlife populations where COMACO worked while comparable areas continued to decline, and higher incomes for participants than non-participants. A separate Cornell University evaluation of 20 COMACO communities against 20 matched controls found children significantly more likely to consume eggsThe Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study comparing COMACO and non-COMACO areas found stabilized wildlife populations where COMACO worked while comparable areas continued to decline, and higher incomes for participants than non-participants. A separate Cornell University evaluation of 20 COMACO communities against 20 matched controls found children significantly more likely to consume eggs, yet found no effect on child growth.

That second result matters as much as the first. An organization that partners on an evaluation, gets a null on the ultimate outcome, and leaves the paper in the peer-reviewed literature is behaving the way this framework rewards. So is the 2011 paper, co-authored by COMACO's own chief executive, which states outright that rigorous proof of the market-access counterfactual is difficult, that the yield comparison was confounded because non-participating farmers had adopted the same methods, and that more than 90 percent of households still reported hunger. That is unusually candid self-reporting, and it also points at the most interesting thing about this model: the confounding was caused by COMACO's own ideas spreading beyond its membership.

3,002,924 tons of verified carbon reductions rest on a modeled baseline, which is standard practice in carbon markets and is not the same as a measured comparison. What makes this organization unusual is the twenty-three-year arc: a cost per household that has fallen from over $25 to $7.20, 244 million surviving trees from a single expert's advice twelve years ago, and a model that now covers a quarter of Zambia.

COMACO's Fierce Certification score is 100/100 points based on our criteria:
✔ Has Ultimate Outcome Goals (20 pts)
✔ Measures Intermediate Outcomes (15 pts)
✔ Measures Ultimate Outcomes (10 pts)
✔ Measures Intermediate and/or Ultimate Counterfactual (10 pts)
✔ Shows Continual Learning & Adaptation (25 pts)

Donate Now! 100% Goes to COMACO

Elephants and other wildlife were being killed in Zambia's Luangwa Valley, and the people killing them were mostly farmers who could not feed their families. That is the organization's founding observation, made more than thirty years ago, and it contains the whole problem.

Without soil fertility and without money for chemical fertilizer, farmers clear new plots every two to three years, which is why Zambia ranks second in Africa and fifth in the world for absolute annual forest loss. Without a buyer within reach, and without road or rail to carry crops anywhere, surplus has no value. Without an alternative, forest becomes charcoal and wildlife becomes meat and income. And when rainfall disappoints, the loss of yield is compounded because land that would have grown food went to cash crops instead.

The human consequences are severe and were documented in 2011: more than 90 percent of households in the valley reported reducing the number or size of meals, experiencing hunger, or losing weight because food was unavailable. Children go hungry, get sick, and miss school. The ecological consequences run in parallel: wildlife populations falling, forest converting to field, and soils losing the water retention, pollination, and microbial life that make farming possible in the first place.

The failure mode of the conventional response is law enforcement. An illegal hunter is arrested, serves time, and on release returns to poaching, because nothing about his options has changed.

The Solution

Make conservation pay better than destruction, and do it through a business.

The core exchange. Farmers organize into cooperatives, sign a conservation pledge, and adopt agroforestry-based regenerative practices. COMACO tracks compliance, pays premium commodity prices to the best-performing cooperatives, and manufactures what it buys into chemical-free food products under the It's Wild! brand. Product sales fund the incentives that keep farmers compliant.

The agronomic engine. Gliricidia sepium, a nitrogen-fixing tree planted among crops as a nutrient pump. The species was recommended twelve years ago by Dr. Rattan Lal, who noted that no one had managed to scale its adoption with small-scale farmers. There are now 244,639,691 surviving Gliricidia trees on COMACO farms.

Four delivery layers (Our Work). Processing hubs that combine manufacturing with farmer support, radio production, and research. District-level Farmer Support Centers for training, crop buying, surveys, and seed banks. Cooperatives with their own local trainers and cashiers, paid by COMACO as a service. And Farm Talk radio, broadcasting twice weekly from 11 stations.

Conservation dividends. Chiefdoms are audited annually on compliance, scored, and paid an ecosystem service payment if they score high enough. In 2025, 15 chiefdoms received input packages worth $40,000.

The poacher transformation program, which began the whole organization, now runs a dedicated center at Kafue National Park training 40 former illegal hunters per six-week intake in alternative livelihood skills.

Carbon revenue from reduced deforestation and sustainable land management, with 55 percent of gross value returned to communities, 35 percent to COMACO, and 10 percent to government.

Mapped against a Theory of Change, the chain runs: markets and skills make conservation-compatible farming more profitable, farmers adopt it, yields rise on smaller plots, clearing and poaching fall, forests and wildlife recover, and households eat better. Nearly every link has some measurement, and two links have measurement against a comparison.

Key Outputs

From the 2025 Annual Report:

342,000 households organized, totalling 472,804 farmers (52 percent female) into 105 cooperatives, reported as 112 cooperatives and 335,230 families elsewhere on the site. Target of 400,000 households by end of 2026
1,726,760 hectares of community-managed forests across 84 chiefdoms
244,639,691 surviving agroforestry trees on more than 122,320 hectares, with 54 percent of farmers practicing agroforestry and over 79 percent compliant with regenerative practices
Annual cost per household of $7.20, down from over $25 when COMACO began 23 years ago
9,250 metric tons purchased from 42,927 farmers, returning $4.5 million to communities; 8,880 tons of finished product at over $10.2 million retail value across 19 products
2,102 illegal hunters surrendered firearms; 45,450 beehives supporting 9,128 farmers; 2,538 seed growers; 735 farmer trainers; 105 cooperative cashiers
Farm Talk radio: 11 stations, 2.1 million listeners, 2,800 solar radios distributed
Carbon: 3,002,924 tons of verified emissions reductions; three verifications completed in COMACO East with four in progress; over 700,000 credits due in COMACO West mid-2026
Community carbon investments to date: 124 boreholes, 42 school rehabilitations, one maternity wing, 26 local enterprises, five trucks, four storage sheds
323 staff; grant portfolio 47 percent institutional funders and 53 percent foundations
Digital tools: the Crop Buying app cut truck turnaround from 3.5 days to 1.5, raised crops meeting quality standards from 67 percent to 82 percent, achieved 100 percent reconciliation of cashier funds, and saved about $47,800 annually

Key Intermediate Outcomes

The intermediary layer is measured annually through surveys randomly sampling 8 percent of registered households, a sampling frame the organization describes as granular enough to study causal relationships between interventions.

Adoption. Over 79 percent of farmers compliant with agroforestry-based regenerative practice with legume rotation, and 54 percent of 472,804 farmers practicing agroforestry. Adoption is the hinge of the whole model, and it is rising while cost per farmer falls.

Input economics. 3,500 kwacha per hectare saved on chemical fertilizer, a potential 428 million kwacha annually at current use, and over 53 percent cost savings per kilogram from community seed banks against commercial seed.

Income. $4.5 million returned to communities from 2025 crop sales, a two-fold increase in dry-season alternative livelihood income, and 55 percent of carbon credit value returned to communities.

Behavior change on the conservation side. 2,102 illegal hunters surrendered firearms, and 45,450 beehives now support 9,128 farmers living around protected forests, which the organization frames as charcoal reliance giving way to honey.

Institutional capacity. Traditional leaders across two-thirds of the operational area signed a collective agreement to enforce local regulations protecting soils and biodiversity, and 15 chiefdoms earned conservation dividends on measured compliance scores.

Two counterfactuals sit here. The 2011 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study compared participant and non-participant incomes and found participants better off, while also verifying that recruitment was reaching less well-off households rather than the already-advantaged. And Dumas et al. (2018) found household egg acquisition significantly higher in project than matched control communities, odds ratio 2.08.

Two honest complications, both from the organization's own literature. The 2011 yield comparison was confounded because non-COMACO farmers had adopted many of the same methods, which the authors attribute to knowledge transfer from COMACO members. That is a measurement failure caused by the intervention working better than intended. And in the egg study, acquisition and consumption gains decayed by endline as egg production fell, which the authors report plainly.

Key Ultimate Outcomes

Wildlife populations are measured against a comparison. The 2011 study documented stabilized wildlife populations in COMACO-supported areas of the Luangwa Valley game management areas while comparable non-COMACO areas continued to decline. That is the clearest ultimate outcome counterfactual in COMACO's evidence base, and it addresses the organization's founding problem directly.

Forest and soil are measured at scale. 1,726,760 hectares under community management, 244,639,691 surviving trees across 122,320 hectares, 250,000 tons of compost produced annually from Gliricidia leaves, and six years of non-chemical compliance sufficient to begin organic certification in 2026. Carbon reductions of 3,002,924 tons are independently verified by AENOR, though against a modeled baseline rather than an observed comparison area.

Child nutrition is measured against matched controls, and the growth result is null. Dumas et al. (2018) evaluated 20 COMACO egg production communities against 20 matched controls over a year. Children in project communities were significantly more likely to consume eggs at midline, odds ratio 5.53. There was no impact on height-for-age z score, which the authors attributed to short follow-up and a modest dose. Separately, COMACO reports that crops grown with regenerative rotation showed a 35 percent increase in mineral content compared with conventionally grown crops.

Child illness. 61 percent of 965 interviewed mothers adopting regenerative farming reported a marked reduction in their children getting sick. That is a substantial finding from a real sample and it has no comparison group.

Continual Learning & Adaptation

Twenty-three years of cost reduction is the clearest evidence. Annual cost per household has fallen from over $25 to $7.20, and the organization publishes the two lessons it credits: that cooperatives with their own local trainers are more cost-effective than external trainers, and that market incentives tied to adoption reduce extension costs because farmers become motivated to learn on their own and teach their neighbors. Both are conclusions drawn from operational data and both changed the delivery model.

It publishes null and unflattering results. The height-for-age null in the egg study. The decay of egg consumption gains by endline. The confounded yield comparison. The statement that rigorous counterfactual proof of market access is difficult. The 90 percent household hunger figure. All of these are in literature COMACO co-authored or partnered on.

Research is a standing function, not an event. The organization describes an annual program of monitoring and data analysis to test the strength of cause-and-effect relationships and identify weaknesses where model improvements can be found, with an 8 percent random household sample every year, and characterizes it as an iterative process.

It responded to a shock by changing the model. The 2023 drought produced a significant operating loss and two years of recovery because farmers lost their seed supply. COMACO's response was to invest in simple irrigation so cooperatives can grow seed crops in winter months, securing the next planting season. The 2025 return to positive operating profit is presented as the test of that response.

Digital tools were built and their effects measured. The Crop Buying app cut truck turnaround from 3.5 days to 1.5, raised crop quality compliance from 67 to 82 percent, achieved full reconciliation of cashier funds, and saved roughly $47,800 a year. The Land Management Data System launched in 2025 aggregates conservation compliance data collected by cooperatives themselves, validated by independent sub-sampling from COMACO staff, which is a deliberate design choice balancing community ownership against verification.

Waste became product. Expelled soy oil, previously sold off as a by-product, became a profitable product after investment in an oil-processing plant. Low-grade honey squeezed from processed beeswax became Honey Butter. Groundnut shells became fuel briquettes for making peanut butter.

The program has been extended geographically and deliberately. The poacher transformation program moved from the Luangwa Valley to Kafue National Park in 2025 with a purpose-built training center, and the radio program is adding a Chiefdom Voices series in 2026 to give traditional leaders a platform, developed with the Eastern Province Jurisdictional Sustainable Landuse Project.

COMACO (Community Markets for Conservation)

Todd Manwaring

Our Recommendation

The Solution

Key Outputs

Key Intermediate Outcomes

Key Ultimate Outcomes

Continual Learning & Adaptation

Further Reading

Written by

Todd Manwaring

Our Recommendation

The Social Problem

The Solution

Key Outputs

Key Intermediate Outcomes

Key Ultimate Outcomes

Continual Learning & Adaptation

Further Reading

Be the first to know when a new organization is certified—and why it meets the standard.

Written by