Southern Malawi has historically been less food secure than the rest of the country, and the current lean season will be no different. More people in the Southern Region are in danger of going hungry in the coming months than in the Central and Northern regions combined. But who are these people, what is behind […]
Policy Note 51: Mitigating the impact of El Niño on hunger in Malawi
Abstract: We describe the likely impact of the recurrent climatic phenomenon of El Niño on maize production in Malawi. Drawing on four decades of historical data, we highlight that in seven out of eleven El Niño years, maize harvests in Malawi suffered a significant decline of 22.5 percent on average, with the southern region of […]
Policy Note 50: Can urban growth reduce rural underemployment?
Abstract: In a recent IFPRI working paper, Van Cappellen and De Weerdt (2023), we show how urban growth reduces underemployment in the rural hinterlands of towns and cities. But leveraging these labor market linkages between urban and rural areas for inclusive growth and poverty reduction will depend on overcoming two barriers. The first is that […]
Policy Note 49: Can Cooperatives Commercialize Farming in Malawi
Abstract: Smallholder farmers constitute the largest group of economic actors in Malawi and there is increasing recognition that the small scale at which they operate does not offer for most a pathway out of poverty, let alone to prosperity. Increasingly the idea is gaining traction that by joining forces through primary agricultural cooperatives, smallholder farmers […]
Policy Note 48: Self-targeted Fertilizer Subsidies
If Malawi’s fertilizer subsidy program aims to increase food security in the country, it should strive to target the most productive farmers. Subsidy levels can be set to self-target this group of farmers. This would maximize output achieved with subsidized fertilizer and eliminate the need for costly and error-prone top-down targeting. Authors: Chimwemwe Banda, Joachim […]
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