A New Beginning for African Agriculture:  Part II

Achieving results is the core of Africare’s approach to development.

Our recently completed food security project in Malawi, Improving Livelihoods through Increasing Food Security (I-LIFE), is one good example of an integrated community-based approach to addressing the challenge of food security for 20,000 vulnerable poor in seven priority districts across the country.  The project included improved seed varieties and production techniques and farmer mobilization into production and marketing groups and savings and loans groups, as well as rural roads and irrigation and targeted nutrition programs for mothers and children under five.

Many important results were achieved by the project.  Almost 90 percent of beneficiaries purchased improved crop varieties with 100 percent adoption of improved agriculture production techniques.  Those interventions and investments in irrigation and feeder roads enabled farmers to have 2-3 crop cycles per season instead of only 1. By the end of the project, beneficiary communities had 9.4 months of food provisioning, up from 6.8 months before the project. There also was a 50 percent reduction in the number of underweight children

On our results page you can see lots of other examples of the concrete results on the ground that we have helped farmers achieve across Africa.

These successes have been achieved by focusing Africare’s agriculture projects on 5 keys to food security.

First, we focus on improving farmer productivity through better management of their natural resources, better access to inputs and technologies including improved seeds, irrigation and better crop management practices.  We help farmers further improve their incomes by reducing post-harvest losses and through value-added processing of their crops.

Second, we strengthen farmers’ links to markets by constructing hundreds of kilometers of durable rural farm-to-market roads using Food for Work. 

Third, we mobilize farmers into farmer-based organizations to do contract farming with local, regional and international agribusiness firms to provide quality and reliable delivery of product into those firms’ supply chains.

Fourth, we strengthen social safety nets for the most vulnerable by preventing and treating maternal and child under-nutrition.

Fifth, and perhaps most importantly for sustainability, we put very heavy emphasis on building local capacity, starting at the community level through the development of the Food Security Community Capacity Index and the indicator of Months of Adequate Household Food Provisioning to help communities manage risk.  Learn More

We also work to strengthen the links of communities with local and national government institutions, including making the critical link between agricultural research stations and farmers using extension workers and volunteer lead farmers.

The next President’s Corner will feature some of the work that we are doing across Africa in the water sector where we take a community-led total sanitation approach to help countries make progress on an important but too often neglected Millennium Development Goal: increasing sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

Return to President's Corner Home>>

Photos by Alexandra Seegers and Elizabeth Williams