Malawi's small farms operate alongside large agricultural estates and a growing number of medium‐scale farms, yet the country's agriculture production generally cannot meet growing demand from domestic and export markets. Agricultural commercialisation, especially in rural areas, is hampered by inadequate marketing infrastructure, limited access to marketing services, poor service provision, and inconsistencies in policy. A weak investment, business, and regulatory climate inhibits development of agricultural enterprises and value addition. More variable climate patterns, marked by later onset or cessation of rains, a longer dry season, and a shorter growing season exacerbate the growing challenges that are hampering the growth of the agriculture sector in the country. To address these challenges, Malawi Government is implementing a six-year AGCOM Project whose operational implementation started in July, 2018
'Commercialization' in this Project refers to the proportion of marketed production from targeted farms and the proportion of marketed agribusiness products from the selected value chains while 'Agricultural value chain products' are products of farms and agribusinesses, including crop, livestock, and fisheries products sold domestically or exported, with or without processing, depending on market requirements
Project Development Objectives
The Project Development Objective (PDO) is to increase commercialization of agriculture value chain products selected under the project
AGCOM PDO level results indicators are the following:
- Increase in yield of selected commodities by producer organizations participating in PAs (crops, livestock, and fisheries)
- Selected agricultural value chain products linked to markets (Producer groups that meet market specifications defined by off‐takers
- Increased value of gross sales by producer groups for products of agricultural value chains supported by the Project
Project Beneficiaries
The Project beneficiaries are various value chain actors, including producers (farmers and farmer producer organizations), buyers (processors, retailers, exporters, and aggregators), and Financial Institutions that will be lending to the agribusiness sector in the country. The Project is ensuring that youth and women are well represented in its interventions
Project Coverage
The AGCOM Project has a national coverage targeting all districts in Malawi and all competitive agriculture value chains covering crops, horticulture, livestock and aquaculture. The Project aims at supporting a minimum of 300 Productive Alliances (PAs) and 100,000 farming households in the country. The total number of targeted beneficiaries is 650,000. Currently, the Project has successfully established 8 PAs, 3,138 households and 20,397 beneficiaries. The names and locations for the Producer Organizations (POs) that are in the 8 PAs are indicated on the map below
Project Value Chains
The Project approach in selecting value chains to be supported is that the value chains are not determined in advance; thus, AGCOM is purposely designed to allow the market to decide which value chains and buyers have strong prospective commercial linkages. This approach prevents the Project from confining its impact at the outset to a small number of producers in particular value chains