Malawi Partnership

Landlocked, crowded, poverty-stricken, Malawi embodies the struggle to improve African farming. The country also symbolizes the gains possible from giving farmers access to inputs like seeds and fertilizers. The Malawian government’s subsidy program, which gives smallholders vouchers to buy seed and fertilizer, has doubled harvests since its introduction in 2004.

To support this progress Yara initiated the Malawi Agricultural Partnership (MAP), a value chain project, in 2007. The project’s initial focus was to make the subsidy program more effective and reduce costs along the fertilizer supply chain. Drawing on experience from similar projects in Tanzania and Ghana, Yara saw the need to engage the entire value chain in a coordinated program of initiatives related to agricultural development. We also sought to combine commercial and developmental objectives – including an investment plan to alleviate the systematic problems in the fertilizer supply chain – involving joint risk-sharing between government, the private sector and donors.

MAP now involves partners like AGRA (Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa), IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development), local authorities and the Norwegian government. A key element of the value chain partnership model is a local institution with the broad knowledge and skills to facilitate multi-sector projects. In Malawi, this is the African Institute of Corporate Citizenship (AICC).

The partnership is now working on three fronts: to create an enabling environment by addressing subsidies, legislative and trade reform, fiscal policy and infrastructure; to create an efficient value chain by supporting the development of input suppliers and retailers, farmers and markets; and to create the business services each of them needs to succeed.

Yara will also continue to support the Mwandama Millennium Villages cluster in southern Malawi, an intensive local development pilot that operates with support from the United Nations. The millennium villagers receive intensive aid in a wide range of areas such as education, health care and establishment of small businesses. On the agricultural front they get seeds and fertilizer on a more generous basis than the nationwide government scheme, and advice to help them diversify into cash crops such as groundnuts, cabbages, tomatoes and fish farming.