Women play a critical role in every link of the value chain in small-scale fisheries, although their best-known roles are in processing and marketing of fish and other fishery products. This perception of the highly gender-segregated division of labour (men fishing / women processing) has shaped the generalized approach in...

A large proportion of Malawian households are caught in a trap where poverty and food insecurity reinforce one another and where periods of food deficits and severe food crises are frequent occurrences. In recognition of this, the Malawian government has since 2005/06 implemented a large-scale Farm Input Subsidy Program (FISP),...

Child labour is work that interferes with compulsory schooling or damages children’s health and personal development. Thanks to continuous efforts at the international and local level, recent global data,1 show that the number of children engaged in child labour worldwide has significantly declined from 215 to 168 million children (40 percent decline...

This paper has two objectives. Our first objective is to review the research evidence on the factors known to be affecting the efficiency with which Malawian farmers use nitrogen fertilizer on maize. It is our position that such factors, along with non-random aspects of most trials, might explain the large...

The future of food security in Africa lies in the hands of African farmers, yet not enough is known about them; data is scarce and their stories are only half told. This report puts smallholder farmers at the center of the dialog about farming and food security in Africa. Too...

Implementation Guidance for Policymakers and Investors

Conventional wisdom holds that Sub-Saharan African farmers use few modern inputs despite the fact that most growth-inducing and poverty-reducing agricultural growth in the region is expected to come largely from expanded use of inputs that embody improved technologies, particularly improved seed, fertilizers and other agro-chemicals, machinery, and irrigation. Yet following...

This research examines the extent of market integration among different bean markets across Malawi. Market integration is an indicator that efficiency exists within the flow of information between markets. The study focused on beans as they are a cheap source of protein affordable by the majority of rural smallholder farmers....

Smallholder farmers in Malawi account for over 80 percent of the population and if the country is to achieve food security, poverty reduction and sustainable development attention to agricultural extension is a sine qua non. Since 2000, Malawi introduced extension reforms to better serve the needs of smallholder farmers. Some...

SOFI 2014 presents updated estimates of undernourishment and progress towards the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) and World Food Summit (WFS) hunger targets

In Malawi, where most of the population relies on agriculture and is considered “small farmers”, better characterizing the diversity of agricultural holdings and the drivers of their transformation is key to inform policy makers and design programs better fitted to the diverse needs and capacities. The World Agriculture Watch (WAW)...

Smallholder farmers in developing countries play a key role in meeting the future food demands of a growing and increasingly rich and urbanized population. However, smallholders are not a homogeneous group that should be supported at all costs. Whereas some smallholder farmers have the potential to undertake profitable commercial activities...

Agroforestry is a set of tools which farmers can use to increase yields, build soil fertility, raise their income, and boost their food security. ICRAF and its partners have worked closely with farmers for decades to promote and develop simultaneous intercropping practices to address the challenges in soil fertility facing...

The objective of this article was to develop a deeper understanding of the interdependences between smallholder farming and the state of environmental management in rural Malawi. We examined the agricultural local governance framework in Malingunde Extension Planning Area (EPA), its contribution to food security and how it conflicts with overall...

Evergreen Agriculture is a combination of conservation agriculture and agroforestry practices within the same spatial and temporal dimensions. In other circles, evergreen agriculture is referred to as agroforestry based conservation agriculture or Conservation Agriculture With Trees (CAWT). Evergreen agriculture is being tested by ICRAF in conjunction with partners in Malawi...

Southern African Agriculture and Climate Change: A Comprehensive Analysis examines the food security threats facing eight of the countries that make up southern Africa — Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe — and explores how climate change will increase the efforts needed to achieve sustainable food security...

Malawi is one of the least developed countries in the world, and therefore poverty remains a key challenge in the country.  The great variations in Malawi’s landscape result in wide spatial differences in climate.

A programme run by the Government of Malawi is providing cash transfers to more than 26,000 of the country's poorest households. FAO's 'From Protection to Production' project (PtoP), run in collaboration with Unicef with funding from DFID and the EU, is evaluating the impact of these cash transfers on economic...

En appui au bureau d’études Bourbon Madagascar, le Gret a participé à l’évaluation de la convention programme de l’ONG Inter Aide dans quatre pays (Madagascar, Ethiopie, Malawi et Sierra Leone) sur le renforcement de l’autonomie et des capacités productives des agricultures familiales en zones rurales isolées d’Afrique Subsaharienne. Le Gret...

This paper is an attempt to measure the economic efficiency of Dedza smallholder Irish potato (Solanum tuberosum) farmers in Malawi using a translog cost frontier, inefficiency effect model and input Elasticities from Seeming Unrelated Regression Model for asystem of cost share equations for labour, fertilizer, seed and land. A sample...