Malawi

Country Context

Malawi, a sovereign state in southern Africa, borders Tanzania, Zambia, and Mozambique. It has enjoyed 60 years of self-rule since gaining independence from the British protectorate. The landlocked country, covering 118,484 square kilometers, is classified as one of the least developed by the United Nations’ 2024 review. Vulnerable to economic shocks and environmental disasters, Malawi faces challenges such as low education, food shortages, weak markets and climate shocks. Seventy percent of Malawians still live below the poverty line due to high unemployment and economic instability. Despite these issues, 80 percent of the population is under 35, presenting opportunities to address agricultural and food system challenges through technology and innovation.

The agriculture sector employs more than 80 percent of the population, primarily as smallholder subsistence farmers. To take advantage of the sector’s potential and transition from subsistence farming to agribusiness entrepreneurship, smallholder farmers and farmer organizations need financial and technical support. The provision of this support will improve production, build resilience to climate change, enhance business management capacities, increase access to capital and financial services and gain access to profitable and inclusive markets.

Our Response

Heifer Malawi integrates social capital development with a market-centered value chain approach to create an enabling environment for family well-being and economic growth. This approach ensures development is locally led, enabling families, project participants, and other stakeholders to find solutions to the challenges they face in the market system while addressing systems-based, push-and-pull factors that discourage smallholder farmers’ participation in the agricultural economy.

Heifer Malawi facilitates value chain development and empowers farmer organizations to help communities build long-term resilience. This effort includes improving smallholder organizations’ business management and institutional capacity, facilitating access to finance for loans and investments, supporting farmers to boost production and productivity and enhancing connections to structured markets. Heifer Malawi’s targeted value chains create jobs and opportunities for women and youth, increasing their incomes to better support their families.

Our primary objective is helping families achieve a sustainable living income, our measure for the amount of money required for a decent life — including safe shelter, nutritious food, clothing, education and health care — while also reaching additional benchmarks for economic and climate resilience.

The Malawi Signature Program

Heifer International’s work is organized at the country level into Signature Programs focused on large-scale, measurable and sustainable impact achieved by building partnerships at all levels. Each program supports farmers through time-bound projects designed to increase their household income.

Malawi Accelerate Signature Program

The Malawi Accelerate Signature Program (MASP) is focused on building the economic resilience of 500,000 smallholder farmers so they can achieve a sustainable living income by 2030. The program uses a market-centered approach to improve agricultural efficiency, reduce market failures and create opportunities for smallholder farmers in the beef, dairy, banana, rice, poultry and oilseeds value chains.