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R. Bezner Kerr, L. Shumba, L. Dakishoni, E. Lupafya, P.R. Berti, L. Classen, S.S. Snapp, M. Katundu

This paper examines a participatory agriculture and nutrition program in northern Malawi that successfully improved child growth, crop diversity, food security through innovative educational strategies and sustainable agriculture. Malawi is a relevant case study, as a low-income country where the majority of people are rural smallholder farmers, and over the last decade the government has pursued an agricultural input subsidy program, with conflicting results. Persistent food insecurity and heavy reliance on maize as a food source in Malawi has multidimensional impacts on families, including low dietary diversity and child undernutrition. Women’s agency and access to agricultural resources is very limited in Malawi, with early marriage associated with low dietary diversity, early pregnancy and high spousal violence for women. Rural Malawian women have less access to education, lower access to land, credit, seeds and other agricultural resources compared to men.

In addition they are constrained by highly unequal workloads, including agricultural labor, household tasks and child care responsibilities.  Understanding ways to improve child nutrition while at the same time empowering marginalized smallscale farmers to innovate provides lessons that Malawi can share with other rural communities in Africa. The authors and collaborating researchers have been conducting this research for over 12 years, and demonstrate that increased knowledge of agroecological methods, farmer-to-farmer teaching, directly addressing unequal social relations and integration of child nutrition and local knowledge are all key factors in improving livelihoods, and employed as they were in this long-term research make this project an exception to conventional agriculture-based interventions. Proven food security and nutritional gains have been achieved through agricultural education that was fully integrated with nutrition, and was focused on farmers, including women farmers and vulnerable members of the communities. The iterative, dialogue-based and farmer-led approaches used mobilized communities to apply agroecological methods and improved child feeding practices, as well as address unequal gender relations.