Malawi is a small country located in southern Africa with only 119,000 km2 for a population of about 16.7 million people. With agriculture as the mainstay of the economy, Malawi’s high population density of 140 people/km2 requires that agricultural productivity and other ecosystem services must be optimized. As part of...

Malawi has the potential to reorient its smallholder agriculture away from being primarily directed towards assuring household subsistence and self-sufficiency to increased commercial production, including of soyabean. This shift would reduce the country’s reliance on tobacco and diversify its agricultural production and exports. As a legume, furthermore, soyabean would also...

Le Malawi est un des pays les plus pauvres et les plus densément peuplés d’Afrique subsaharienne. Les faibles moyens économiques du pays ont fait de l’agriculture familiale le pilier principal de l’économie malawienne. En effet, plusieurs études ont été faites dans le but d’évaluer l’impact des faibles moyens économiques sur...

Building an enterprise takes many different tasks, from stepping into the shoes of potential customers to designing products or services, to running a marketing campaign. This was one of the key messages for women farmers at SACAU’s Agro-preneurship training in Johannesburg this month. The three-day training from 27th – 29th September...

El Niño is the warming of sea surface temperature in the tropical Pacific, which occurs roughly every 2 to 7 years, lasting from 6 to 24 months. While the main threat to food production is reduced rainfall and drought in some regions, El Niño can also cause heavy rains and...

Floods, droughts, heat waves, cold spells, and other natural disasters are large sources of risk for farmers. For instance, in semiarid areas of India, 89 percent of farming households cited drought as the largest risk to agricultural production. Climate change may make weather patterns more extreme and unpredictable, further exposing...

Malawi is a small landlocked country in southern Africa, bordered by Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia. The majority of Malawians are smallholder farmers, who grow crops for both food and income. More than half of the Malawian population lives in poverty, and the rate of food insecurity is very high. Typical...

This report is the product of field work conducted by ACB and Kusamala Institute for Agriculture and Ecology in Dowa district in central Malawi. The objective of the research was to deepen our understanding of the role of farmer seed varieties in smallholder production systems that have come under heavy...

This book on Economics of Land Degradation and Improvement provides with valuable knowledge and information both at the global, regional, and national levels on the costs of land degradation and benefits of taking action against land degradation. A key advantage of this book is that it goes beyond the conventional...

This study identifies factors that affect resilience to drought among smallholder farmers in Salima, one of the districts frequently affected by drought in Malawi. The study contributes to the existing literature by constructing a drought resilience index (DRI) and uses it to determine the effect of drought resilience on the...

This paper aims to test this hypothesis and to contribute to better understanding of strategies to revitalize the agricultural extension system in Malawi. Specifically, it examines the interplay between the fertilizer subsidy and access to extension services, and their impact on farm productivity and food security in Malawi. Results show that...

Child labour hampers children’s education, and quite often has adverse effects on their health, safety and morals. However, not all tasks performed by children are considered child labour. Some activities may help children acquire important livelihood skills and contribute to their survival and food security. But much of the work...

The 2014/15 season was a nightmare in Malawi as the country faced floods at the beginning of the season and then terminal drought. Most farmers lost property and crops through flooding and water lodging while surviving crop fields were burnt dry prematurely by the terminal drought which was experienced towards...

This study considers the extent to which smallholder farmers, including those who do not necessarily produce a surplus for the market, might benefit from participating in warehouse receipt systems (WRS) in terms of improved income and food security. We consider three potential channels: efficient food markets; reduced post-harvest losses; and...

Purchase from Africans for Africa (PAA Africa) – a pilot project inspired by the Brazilian learning on institutional food procurement – recently released a report on the lessons learned from the first phase of implementation. This report details the joint efforts in five countries to increase smallholder farmers’ access to...

Malawi faces significant challenges in meeting its future food security needs because there is little scope for increasing production by simply expanding the area under cultivation. One potential alternative for sustainably intensifying agricultural production is by means of conservation agriculture (CA), which improves soil quality through a suite of farming...

Nutrition education experts in Malawi have initiated a review of the country’s nutrition education curriculum to be incorporated in the curricula of Teacher Training Colleges. The review was made during a two-day national consultation workshop held in Kasungu from 16-17 November 2015 under the “Strengthening School Food & Nutrition Programs...

Regional Office for Africa quarterly newsletter covering the months of October to December, 2015

Expansion of irrigation is a recurrent objective of the agricultural development plans formulated by successive governments in Malawi. More intensive and continual use of Malawi’s water and agricultural land resources is expected to increase and stabilize production of food and export crops, thereby increasing farm incomes, spurring growth in the...

Although dramatic increases in maize yields since the implementation of the Farm Income Subsidy Program (FISP)—the major national program that subsidizes fertilizer and improved seed primarily for maize cultivation—have likely enhanced household maize self-sufficiency (Chibwana et al. 2012), Malawian diets remain poorly diversified. Indeed, the contribution of foods other than...