Malawi’s agricultural sector supports 80% of rural livelihoods, and relies primarily on small-scale, rain-fed production. This means Malawi’s farmers are easily impacted by heat, droughts, and floods that destroy crops, both directly and through outbreaks of pests and diseases.

Since 2019, Malawi has been hit by a succession of natural disasters - five cyclones and failed rainy seasons that have left an estimated 4.4 million Malawians (almost a quarter of the population) without reliable access to food.

While methods exist to help farmers adapt to these kinds of challenges, many have not been tested in the Malawian context, or deployed at a large scale.

For example, drought- and heat-resistant seeds are perhaps the single best way to maintain and even increase agricultural productivity in the face of climate shocks, but are often more expensive than conventional seed, meaning farmers are unwilling or unable to pay that extra cost without proof that the investment will pay off.

And new seed varieties typically have to go through lengthy testing, approval, and certification processes before they are able to be used in a country for the first time.

In Malawi, this process typically takes up to seven years.

Partnering for Success

From 2016-2023, the Palladium-implemented USAID Feed the Future Malawi Agricultural Diversification Activity (AgDiv) hit upon a novel solution to this problem. “We partnered with major agricultural companies operating in Malawi to jumpstart the testing and uptake of these new technologies,” explains Palladium’s Carl Larkins, AgDiv Chief of Party. “These large companies had several key assets – lots of available land on which to test new seed varieties, the financial resources to invest in bulk-purchasing the most effective improved seeds, and extensive supplier networks of smallholder farmers to whom they could provide those seeds.”

AgDiv focused its resources on value chains of importance to food security and livelihoods in Malawi, including soy and peanut.

To speed up the testing and uptake of climate-smart seeds, AgDiv linked its partner companies with Malawi’s Department of Agricultural Research Services and USAID’s Soybean and Peanut Innovation Labs to test new varieties that are resistant to heat, drought, and diseases such as soybean rust and groundnut rosette disease.

“By facilitating access to large and irrigated tracts of private land, AgDiv greatly increased the number of trials possible in a given year, testing a total of 135 soy varieties and 1,600 peanut varieties for suitability to the Malawian context,” Larkins adds. “These trials cut the typical time needed to get new seeds to market by almost half and resulted in government approvals for release of 12 new seed varieties, the first in almost a decade.”

Partnering with these companies also helped get these resilient seeds in the hands of farmers quickly once they were approved. Their extensive networks of suppliers meant that AgDiv could easily reach more than 26,000 farmers with the new technology. And because the seeds were tried at such a large scale, there were over 5,000 MT of certified seeds ready for distribution.

Larkins explains that the system ended up being very timely as Malawi suffered outbreaks of both soybean rust and rosette during the trials. “With AgDiv testing so many varieties at once at such a large scale, its partners were able to identify and quickly deploy the most resistant ones, helping thousands of farmers quickly bounce back.”

This innovative approach was such a success that AgDiv’s private sector partners have adopted the model themselves to continue to trial new varieties in the country. But improved seeds were just one of the many climate-smart technologies and practices that AgDiv helped to deploy through its private partners.

The key is that these investments benefited not only the companies, but the farmers as well. AgDiv found that with an investment of less than US$200 per hectare, a farmer could increase productivity more than four-fold and earn an additional US$900-$2,700 in income. In all, AgDiv’s private sector-led approach helped over 486,000 farmers to adapt to the effects of climate change in Malawi.

Palladium is continuing to trial and jump-start uptake of climate-smart practices with many of these same partners under the follow-on program, the USAID and Ireland Malawi Growth Poles Activity.

“If we’re to truly protect Malawian and other African farmers across the continent from the worst effects of climate change, similar partnerships must be replicated and scaled in other countries and contexts,” Larkins adds.

Only by creating these kinds of pathways for poor and vulnerable households to easily adopt climate-smart technologies and practices can the world help them to escape and stay out of poverty in the face of climate shocks and stresses.