Food systems are at the heart of Africa’s economic growth and development plan, Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want.

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.

Malawi experienced modest growth from 2009 to 2019, with average annual GDP growth of 4.7 percent.

To strengthen the agricultural extension curriculum, the present study was undertaken in sub-Saharan Africa covering Nigeria, Malawi, South Africa, Uganda, and Kenya during 2021-2023.

Transformation of the agri-food system (AFS) is a leading pathway to achieve the USG Global Food Security Strategy Objective 1 of “Inclusive agriculture-led growth”.

The world is not on track to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. The prevalence of hunger and poverty—the two core goals which are the litmus test for everything else—are on the rise.

Malawi has made significant progress in improving nutrition outcomes in the past decades. Despite this, the rates of stunting and anaemia remain high and overweight and obesity amongst women is rising.

Global food, fuel, and fertilizer prices have risen rapidly in recent months, driven in large part by the fallout from the ongoing war in Ukraine and the sanctions imposed on Russia.

This report provides a farm-level analysis of the effects of the COVID-19 crisis, 12–15 months in, using a nationally representative rural household survey conducted in June–July 2021. We draw three major observations from the survey.

We examine the association between on-farm production diversity on household dietary diversity in Malawi using microdata collected as part of an environmentally sustainable agricultural intensification program.

Malawi, like other southern African countries, has endured several waves of infection since the COVID-19 pandemic started. The disease has had severe effects on the economy, including the agriculture sector.

Women play important roles at different nodes of both agricultural and off-farm value chains, but in many countries their contributions are either underestimated or limited by prevailing societal norms or gender-specific barriers.

This report provides an update on the short-term impacts of COVID-19 on the Malawian economy in light of the sharp increase in COVID-19 cases in December 2020 and January 2021.

This working paper builds on a report which was prepared for the 2020 ECAMA Lakeshore Conference in November 2020.

Policymakers need to know what policies, investments, and actions they can take to ensure food systems transform in a healthy, sustainable, and equitable way.

Governments and development partners looking to accelerate progress in addressing malnutrition have been examining how to use interventions in value-chains to improve diets.

Despite the strong interest on the role of agri-food value chains in advancing health and nutrition goals, guidance on how to actually design and assess related development programming has only recently emerged.

This chapter examines the headway that has been made in Malawi in bringing the agriculture sector on board as a partner in addressing malnutrition multisectorally, and the factors that are driving progress.

Agriculture's vast potential to improve nutrition is just beginning to be tapped.

This is the third in a series of Key Facts sheets that IFPRI is producing based on the third and fourth Integrated Household Surveys (IHSs).