Initially hailed a huge success, Malawi’s effort to boost agriculture with fertiliser subsidies appears to have met with failure. The author has a look at what went wrong, arguing that developments must be assessed against the backdrop of politics.
As with other countries, agricultural extension and advisory services (EAS) in Malawi are provided by public, private, and non-profit organisations. While it has become commonplace to refer to this collection of actors as a system, this claim is only valid in the loosest of terms, as many of the component parts do not functionally interact with others in an operational sense, tending rather to function as independent sub-networks within larger national, and international spheres of exchange.
Land degradation and soil erosion have emerged as serious challenges to smallholder farmers throughout southern Africa. To combat these challenges, conservation agriculture (CA) is widely promoted as a sustainable package of agricultural practices. Despite the many potential benefits of CA, however, adoption remains low. Yet relatively little is known about the decision-making process in choosing to adopt CA. This article attempts to fill this important knowledge gap by studying CA adoption in southern Malawi.
Malawi, a landlocked country in
southern, central Africa, depends on its natural resources,
especially the agriculture sector, to meet the demands of a
population of about 11 million people. The country has
developed a remarkable fishing industry, keeping in mind
that about 20 percent of the area is covered by water,
including the famous Lake Malawi (called Lake Nyasa by the
riparian states, Mozambique and Tanzania). Lake Malawi/Nyasa
This paper examines the impacts of
natural disasters on schooling investments with special
focus on the roles of ex-ante actions and ex-post responses
using panel data from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Malawi. The
importance of ex-ante actions depends on disaster risks and
the likelihood of public assistance, which potentially
creates substitution between the two actions. The findings
show that higher future probabilities of disasters increase
This paper applies a growth diagnostics
approach to identify the most binding constraints to
private-sector growth in Malawi - a small, landlocked
country in Southern Africa with one of the lowest per capita
incomes in the world. The approach aims to identify the
constraints (in terms of public policy, implementation, and
investments) most binding on marginal investment, and
therefore whose relaxation would have the largest impact on
Malawi needs to focus on exports to
maintain and broaden its current inspiring levels of
economic growth. The focus of future policy should therefore
be on reforms that improve competitiveness in global and
regional markets. This does not require a fundamental shift
in direction, but instead a rebalancing of policy and
expenditures to support an outward-oriented development
framework. Until the recent global financial crisis,
The Government of Malawi has since 2005
been pursuing a growth strategy mainly based on increasing
the volume of agricultural exports. This entails that Malawi
should endeavor to improve the competitiveness of its
agricultural commodities so as to gain an increasing share
of the regional and international markets. This paper
analyzes the competitiveness of the country's key
agricultural commodities -- tobacco, maize, cotton, and rice
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