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Malawi Market Transitions for New Growth Opportunities

Project Status: Start up (total award value of $23.5 million to be invested from 2022-2027)

The “Market Transitions to Enable New Growth Opportunities” project (MTENGO) uses a farmer-first approach grounded in market incentives to increase resource-efficient, reliable, and sustainable agricultural production in Malawi in the face of climate unpredictability. MTENGO enables farmers to adopt climate smart agriculture (CSA), targeting medium-sized farms whose market orientation offers a strong incentive for adoption of CSA activities. The USDA Food for Progress-funded project works with market-ready farmer organizations, agro-enterprises, entrepreneurs, and traders in these regions, ensuring efficient and reliable production to supply staple crops to the domestic market and higher-value cash crops to regional and international markets.

MTENGO’s approach will enable farmers to:

  1. Diversify and achieve stable returns from their farming portfolio through climate smart farming by responding to market demands with diversified production.
  2. Increase access to water for productive purposes through improved water management practices.
  3. Make ecosystem services work for farmers by improving farmer access to, and collective management of, water, soil, and forest products; and
  4. Increase access to markets and finance so farmers can make climate smart investments.

The project will align interventions with how farmers value practices and technologies, focusing not just on how to increase productivity but also how to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and eliminate wastes that contribute to poor natural resource management and climate change. Interventions will include:

  • Adaptation efforts such as improved soil and water management, introduction of new cash crops and/or new varieties of current crops, managing post-harvest loss and waste, integrated pest management, and forest management.
  • Identification, trial, and testing (in consultation and collaboration with farmers) climate-smart techniques and technologies, and then scaling up.
  • Focus on medium-sized commercial farmers in Rumphi, Mzuzu, Mzimba, Nkhata Bay, and Ntchisi districts.
  • Crop focus selected via value chain assessments of soy, coffee, honey, chili peppers and banana.

Learn more about this project

Contact:

Craig Tenney
International Program Specialist, Craig.Tenney@usda.gov

Ingrid Ardjosoediro
Director, Food for Progress, Ingrid.Ardjosoediro@usda.gov

Collaborating agencies, organizations, or institutions:

Winrock, International