“How about a one-child-one-chicken rule?” One of the women farmers breaks the contemplative silence during a field training on rural poultry-keeping in Malawi’s Chiadzulu District as part of the Crop-Livestock Integration and Marketing in Malawi...
MoreButcher men of Balaka cut to the heart of the problem in goat markets
The butcher men of Balaka in southern Malawi are a group of rough-and-ready men, often considered shrewd and unscrupulous, and almost always overlooked in development projects. No one could have imagined that these middlemen – the least...
MoreGross margin analysis: Choosing more profitable agricultural enterprises
At the end of a training for farmers in Gross Margin Analysis, the chairperson of the Thobola Women’s Club stood up, looked around and said: “For the first time we feel we are finally able to help ourselves in choosing profitable enterprises, as...
MoreI dream of bumper yields: Farming with a vision in Malawi
“I want to be harvesting 100 bags of maize and 70 bags of pigeonpea from my farm,” a farmer from Thumbwe EPA in Chiradzulu district, southern Malawi, narrates what he dreams of achieving in his farming enterprise during one of the first...
MoreInnovation Platforms: Malawian agriculture drumming to a new beat
Agriculture is about people. People talk all the time, but not always about the right stuff! The most effective way to find solutions to the challenges of farming, is to get people talking – about agriculture, and the solutions, rather than only...
MoreThe fruits of our efforts: How do we communicate them?
The challenge faced by research-for-development projects promoting rural innovation is often the inability to communicate critical information to the right audience in a timely manner. At the beginning of the recent ICRISAT-led communication...
More