How to engage farmers that have limited formal education is at the foundation of environmentally sound and equitable agricultural development. 

This study describes the process of development of an innovative curriculum, which integrates agroecology, nutrition, climate change, gender, and other dimensions of social equity across 2 weeks of training explicitly for smallholders in southern Africa with limited formal education. Developed in partnership with Malawian farmers, community development experts, and academics from five countries, the curriculum was piloted with 520 smallholder farming households in Malawi and Tanzania, and evaluated using qualitative techniques.