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Agricultural commercialisation has the potential to provide a number of beneficial outcomes, including higher incomes and living standards for smallholder farmers. However, for these outcomes to be achieved, commercialisation must be inclusive and broad-based so as to link a large proportion of smallholders in rural areas to commercial, highly profitable value chains. In Malawi, where smallholder farmers contribute about 80 per cent to total food production and 20 per cent to total agricultural export earnings, agricultural commercialisation is especially imperative. While several activities have been undertaken to promote smallholder agricultural commercialisation over the past three decades, progress has not been satisfactory. Most smallholder farmers do not engage with markets on a consistent or sustainable basis. The main goal of the study on which this briefing paper is based was, therefore, to understand and track the underlying dynamics of smallholder agricultural commercialisation over time, and to identify policy recommendations to address the issues that exist in its uptake.

In the past few decades, climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has been promoted to improve food security and raise incomes as a strategy for sustainable agricultural development. The adoption rates among smallholder farmers, particularly in Africa, remain low and have varied in different contexts. We investigated the market participation spill over effects from the adoption of CSA practices in central Malawi. We tested the hypothesis that the extent of the use of CSA practices in the past 10 years can lead to production surpluses that enable smallholder farmers to participate in markets and thereby increase agricultural incomes. The findings suggest, among others, the need to intensify efforts to promote CSA adoption specifically over a longer period for benefits of the technologies to materialise. The adoption of CSA practices over time enhances crop market participation – an important aspect required for production sustainability as well as for transforming agriculture towards greater market orientation among smallholder farmers.

Many years of significant investment into the production and adoption of productivity-enhancing technologies and practices in agriculture have not yielded the desired results. Most smallholder farmers in Africa remain trapped in poverty. Having realised that addressing production challenges alone is not enough to impact the lives of poor smallholder farmers, resources and attention have now shifted to the marketing side of agriculture. Organising farmers into farmer producer organisations (FPOs), like clubs, associations and cooperatives, has been one of the strategies aimed at commercialising smallholder agriculture. In Malawi, smallholder farmers have been organised into FPOs of various types and sizes. This qualitative study interrogated the effectiveness of FPOs in Malawi in meeting their objectives, including the objective of enhancing commercialisation of smallholder farmers through increased access to farm inputs, markets, and agricultural extension and advisory services.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused disruptions to national and global economies with devastating effects on food systems and livelihoods across the globe. These effects of the pandemic on poverty, hunger, and malnutrition, among others, are likely to be greater among low and middle-income countries like those in sub- Saharan Africa, including Malawi. This is because even before the COVID-19 pandemic began the proportion of people facing poverty, and food and nutrition insecurity were already high. It is, therefore, imperative to understand the effects of COVID-19 on food systems and rural livelihoods. Using a multi-stage ‘rapid assessment’, this study provides real-time insights into how the COVID-19 crisis unfolded in Malawi and how rural people and food and livelihood systems respond.

This study was carried out to understand the underlying dynamics of agricultural commercialisation in Malawi, especially among smallholder farmers. Despite various concerted efforts to accelerate agricultural growth and transformation, the progress among smallholder farmers has been less satisfactory. Most of the smallholder farmers do not engage with markets on a consistent and sustainable basis. Consequently, the aim of this paper was to demonstrate that there is no one ideal type of agricultural commercialisation that can be realised through investment and policy intervention.

Many sub-Saharan African countries implementing agricultural input subsidies programmes (AISP) concentrate on fertilizers and staple food crops which may have little or no effect on consumption of diverse nutrient dense non-staple foods. The programme in Malawi – the Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP) – includes legume seeds, but little research has been undertaken to evaluate the effects of this strategy on household dietary diversity. In this study, we used two waves of integrated household panel survey data of 2013 and 2016 to examine the dietary diversity gains from inclusion of legume seed coupons in the programme. The control function approach for dealing with selection bias into a programme is used in Poisson regression of panel data. The results show that access as well as redemption of legume coupons is positively associated with diversified diets. This is especially through location fixed effects in the southern region of Malawi, higher production diversity, greater land holding sizes and the sale of maize. Further, households that had less need to satisfy hunger through the growing of maize were those likely to redeem legume coupons. The results suggest a more nuanced pathway of impact from coupon access, redemption or type of crop produced to dietary diversity than the pathway that might be expected, and have implications for how best to understand and conceptualise the tensions and synergies between addressing different aspects of malnutrition in all its forms – and suggest the importance of addressing food insecurity constraints that potentially limit the growing of nutrient-rich legume crops as well as wider increases to dietary diversity. The results also point to the importance of the income pathway and food markets in facilitating greater dietary diversity. Further consideration of these issues by policymakers and the wider agri-nutrition community will be important to advance the discussion and research of how best to design AISP and other public policy to address malnutrition in all its forms.

Agricultural commercialisation is widely recognised as a catalyst to economic growth and development in low and middle-income countries. This study investigates gender and social differences in agricultural commercialisation in rural Malawi. Specifically, the paper analyses different levels of agricultural commercialisation among gender and wealth categories; the specific gender and social issues that facilitate or impede agricultural commercialisation among gender and wealth categories; and their implications for commercialisation and livelihoods among gender and wealth categories.

This paper explores the political economy of the groundnut value chain in Malawi. The paper uses a combination of insights from the theoretical perspectives of political settlement, rents and policymaking to examine this value chain. Fused together, these theoretical perspectives underpin a political economy analysis framework, which entails systematically mapping all key actors in an issue area; identifying their interests and recognising their forms of power (political, economic, social, and ideological); understanding their relationships with each other; and appreciating the issues, narratives, and ideas that shape how and why they interact with each other.

The authors of this paper attempt use quantitative methods to determine the different factors of livelihood trajectories in the context of agricultural commercialisation. To do this, they draw on primary evidence from household surveys conducted over a span of ten years in Mchinji and Ntchisi districts, in rural Malawi. The authors hypothesise that households that are more commercialised are more likely to expand their investments in agriculture and/or take up livelihoods outside of agriculture. Crucially, they find that factors driving livelihood trajectories are not the same for farmers in different pathways, and highlight the need for policymakers to study findings emphasise the need to adopt context-dependent development approaches, in order to provide sustainable relief from poverty for farming households.

COVID-19 continues to impact households and economies worldwide. For this reason, in June 2020 APRA started assessing its likely effects on food systems and livelihoods in Malawi. This report presents insights from the second round (R2) of data collection in October 2020. Data was collected from a stratified random sample of 111 households (59 female and 52 male respondents) drawn from an APRA household survey of groundnut producers in Mchinji and Ntchisi districts, Central Region, as well as from eight key informants. One additional round of research is planned for the first half of 2021.

Given the ravaging effects of the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide, this study seeks to estimate its likely impact on food systems and livelihoods in Malawi. This briefing note is based on our stratified random sample of 114 household heads (32 female and 82 male) drawn from an APRA household survey of groundnut producers in Mchinji and Ntchisi districts, Central Region, as well as seven key informant interviews from those areas. The APRA COVID-19 data collection will be carried out over three rounds. This report presents insights obtained from the first round of research conducted during June/July 2020.

Mobile money is increasingly promoted as a strategy to improve financial outcomes and livelihoods in low-income countries. However, its adoption and use among the poor remains low. We exploited a randomized experiment that exposed members of Village Savings and Loan Associations in Malawi to a financial-literacy and mobile-money training program, which was reinforced by weekly text-message reminders. We analyzed the impact of our intervention using survey data collected in the field as well as administrative data from the main telecommunications operators in the area. We found that treated individuals were more likely to have greater knowledge of mobile-money transactions than non-treated ones. They were also more likely to report receiving and saving money using mobile money and were more likely to report that they kept their savings in a formal financial institution. Interestingly, these effects were concentrated in relatively less economically developed areas. We used administrative data to analyze the effects of our intervention on the volume of mobile-money transactions. While the estimated effect had the expected positive sign, it was not statistically significant. We hypothesized that this result may be related to the fact that individuals also relied on local agents to perform mobile-money transactions; such behavior was not captured in administrative data. This is among the first studies to provide rigorous field-based evidence regarding how financial training supported by text-message reminders can influence mobile-money behavior. It is also among the very first to study the effects of such an intervention among members of Village Savings and Loan Associations.

Food markets have been found to be, in many settings, important in shaping diets and nutritional outcomes. However, more evidence and improved metrics are needed to understand these relationships. We examined relationships between food market participation and household dietary diversity in populations of rural Malawi facing hunger and poor nutrition. We analysed, using Poisson regression, survey data from 400 households in two districts of rural Malawi in post-harvest and lean seasons of 2017/18. We also developed a new metric of food purchases to support our examination of food market participation. The findings include clear associations between food purchase diversity and household dietary diversity, and suggest households engaging more with food markets are more likely to have diversified diets and better nutrition.