Key takeaways

• A four-year study in Malawi examined bundled support to smallholders, testing cash or in-kind transfers with and without intensive extension services.
• Combining the two interventions produced larger and more durable gains in crop production and household consumption than either intervention alone.
• The findings suggest policymakers should consider multiple constraints affecting the productivity of smallholder agricultural producers.

Republished with permission of VoxDev.

Smallholder agricultural production in sub-Saharan Africa continues to fall short of its potential. Recent evidence finds that crop yields among smallholders are stagnant or even declining (Wollburg et al. 2024), and that no single constraint fully explains this pattern (Suri et al. 2024). The implication is that interventions that address constraints in isolation are unlikely to be successful. Growing evidence suggests that combining multiple interventions can unlock benefits that no single component achieves alone. For example, in Kenya, a program bundling credit, inputs, insurance, and technical advice found large gains in yields and profits for smallholder maize farmers (Deutschmann et al. 2025). But there is still much to learn about which combinations of interventions work, for whom, for how long, and whether such gains translate into improvements in overall well-being.

While many programs evaluate the provision of farm inputs and/or extension services (Caldwell et al. 2019), a growing body of work suggests that agricultural labor markets are an important constraint for many farmers, even smallholders. Evidence from Rwanda shows that failures in land and labor markets generate misallocation that limits technology adoption, even when the technology is demonstrably profitable (Jones et al. 2022). Related evidence from Zambia shows that seasonal liquidity constraints force poor farmers to sell their labor at low wages during the hungry season rather than invest it on their own farms, and that relieving these constraints raises both farm output and local wages (Fink et al. 2020).

Our research contributes to this evidence base by examining a program in Malawi jointly targeting two binding constraints among smallholder cash crop farmers: resource constraints, addressed through cash or in-kind transfers, and information and management constraints, addressed through intensive agricultural extension services (Ambler, de Brauw, and Godlonton 2026). Our design allows us to isolate the independent effects of each component and identify their complementarities, while tracking these effects over four years. The design also recognizes the importance of labor shortages at specific times during the growing season and management advice as a complement to technical training.

Targeting resource and knowledge constraints together

Our research focuses on smallholder farmers growing soy and groundnuts who were members of the National Smallholder Farmers’ Association of Malawi (NASFAM) in Malawi. NASFAM is a large smallholder-owned organization that promotes farming as a business and provides both commercial and social services to its members.

The program drew on two cross-cutting randomized interventions.

Resource constraints. Farmer clubs were randomly assigned to receive transfers totaling approximately $84 (roughly 15% of the gross value of agricultural output at baseline), paid out in three installments timed to the agricultural calendar. Some clubs received the full transfer in cash; others received a combination of cash and in-kind inputs of equivalent value (hoes, seeds, sacks, and inoculant). A control group received only the resources typically associated with NASFAM membership (a seed loan worth 28% of the total value of the transfers received by treatment farmers).

Information and management constraints. Within each transfer arm, clubs were additionally randomized to receive either standard group-based NASFAM extension services or an intensive extension treatment. Intensive extension was specifically designed to simultaneously address two gaps: technical agricultural knowledge and farm management skills, including planning, record-keeping, and input decisions. The dual focus reflects an understanding that both knowing what to do in their own circumstances and being able to plan and execute it are necessary for farmers to improve their outcomes.  

The research design allows us to estimate the independent effect of each component and their interaction. It further builds on earlier work by Ambler et al. (2020) in Senegal that examined a similar program. We collected data at baseline and in three follow-up rounds spanning four years, enabling us to track investment behaviors, crop production, and household consumption over time.

Transfers alone improve focal crop production, but fall short of full transformation

In the first year of the program, farmers who received transfers (cash or inputs) invested significantly more in their farms than control group farmers. This investment was concentrated on labor expenditures. Transfer recipients substantially increased expenditures on hired day labor (ganyu), which drove up production of the program’s focal crops, soy and groundnuts—gains that persisted into years two and three, after the transfers had ended. However, transfers alone did not translate into gains in the total value of crop production. Farmers who only received transfers reallocated their input expenditures towards the focal cash crops without increasing the overall scale of their agricultural operation.

Extension services alone, without transfers, produced more limited effects. Farmers who received intensive extension in the absence of resource transfers gained knowledge and improved their management practices, but lacked the financial resources to act on that knowledge at the scale required to meaningfully shift production. 

Figure 1

Complementarities between transfers and intensive extension 

Farmers who received both transfers and intensive extension services had larger gains than farmers who received either component alone. They exhibited gains in agricultural investment and focal crop production and, moreover, increased total agricultural production and household consumption. We document clear complementarities, as the returns to addressing both constraints were higher than the additive effect of addressing the two components independently. 

Extension services provide farmers with knowledge about how to use their land and inputs more effectively, but these results suggest that this knowledge has limited value without the resources to implement it. At the same time, transfers provide resources, but resources invested without detailed knowledge about optimal practices may not be used as efficiently. In this context, when both are provided together, farmers invest more, produce more, and have higher living standards as a result. 

These complementarities last even after programming ends. Two and three years after the transfers were given out and one and two years after the extension concluded, farmers who had received the bundled intervention continued to outperform those who received only one component. Investment, production, and consumption remained elevated, suggesting that the combined intervention generated durable changes in farmers’ practices and productive capacity.

Policy implications: Beyond technology to enabling factors 

These results contribute to an evidence base that indicates that policymakers should consider multiple constraints affecting the productivity of smallholder agricultural producers. Policymakers are likely looking to catalyze the adoption of technologies that can help smallholder livelihoods stay resilient to increased weather variation brought on by climate change and meet changing food demand driven by urbanizing consumers. At the same time, our work also highlights the importance of looking beyond technology adoption to enabling factors such as labor constraints. Receiving transfers allowed farmers to access additional labor for their farms, and additional workers were the primary mechanism through which transfers, amplified by improved management of this labor, translated into higher crop production. This increased use of hired labor has the potential to have additional effects beyond simply improving production. Workers in the local labor market could benefit from the increased demand for casual labor, while the ability to hire workers can also offer other household members the opportunity to pursue opportunities off-farm. In doing so, our research adds to the evidence base on how best to address multiple constraints to increasing production and improve smallholder welfare.

Kate Ambler and Alan de Brauw are Senior Research Fellows with IFPRI’s Markets, Trade, and Institutions Unit; Susan Godlonton is an Associate Professor of Economics at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. This post first appeared on VoxDev. Opinions are the authors’.

Reference:
Ambler, Kate; de Brauw, Alan; and Godlonton, Susan. 2026. Transfers, information and management advice: Direct effects and complementarities in Malawi. Journal of Development Economics 178(January 2026): 103601. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2025.103601