Anderson Gondwe

This note has been prepared by IFPRI Malawi at the request of the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the United States Agency for International Development Malawi (USAID), and estimates how much export revenue Malawi has lost due the export ban on maize during the summer/autumn of 2017. Using three potential export locations in East Africa, transportation costs to these locations from central Malawi, and two alternative estimates of Malawi’s likely maize surplus, this note estimates that Malawi lost between MWK 25 billion and MWK 69 billion (approximately $34 to $95 million) from the export ban in the 2016/17 agricultural year.Non-PRIFPRI1; MaSSP; CRP2DSGD; PIMCGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM

The aim of the study was to track learners as a group or cohort over a specified period of time. This longitudinal data cohort analysis was to determine how successful learners progressed through the Western Cape public education system and how many eventually dropped out of this system. The Central Education Management Information System (CEMIS) datasets from 2007-2014 were used to create a longitudinal dataset of individual learners. The study shows the importance of unit-level records. With the availability of unit-level learner records key questions can be answered such as: “What is the profile of the learners who dropped out of the system, or what is the profile of the learners who progressed without any repetition?” When individual learner-unit records are available one can track learners as a group or cohort over a specified period of time. Longitudinal cohort tracking provides a more complete picture and true reflection of the education system about the progress (dropout and...

After reviewing Malawi’s recent export experience, this policy note examines the types and potential contributions of structured markets to export marketing with a specific focus on commodity exchanges and export mandates. An export mandate means that a commodity cannot be exported except via a structured market.

Following poor harvests in the 2015/16 cropping season in Malawi, vulnerability assessments found that nearly 6.7 million people, primarily in the Southern and Central regions, were likely to suffer from food insecurity before the next harvest. The government of Malawi and its development partners designed the 2016/17 Food Insecurity Response Programme (FIRP) in Malawi to meet the food needs of many of the households affected, mobilizing approximately USD 265 million in resources to do so. In the wake of this intervention, a team led by the International Food Policy Research Institute was contracted to assess the quality of this humanitarian response along four primary dimension: Assess the quality of the national food security assessments which began the response; Investigate the accuracy of the geographical and beneficiary targeting within selected areas; conduct an operational assessment of the humanitarian response design and implementation; and Assess overall programme and draw...

In early 2016, Malawi suffered its second consecutive year of harvest failure. An emergency was declared in April 2016 and the resulting humanitarian response, known as the Food Insecurity Response Program (FIRP), was of unprecedented scale: almost 40 percent of the population received in-kind food or cash transfers (or both) at an estimated cost of US$ 287 million. Yet despite the extensive nature of the response, prices for the main food staple, maize, stayed relatively ‘flat’ throughout most of the year and then declined during the pre-harvest lean season. This paper examines this paradox, focusing on why in-kind food distribution did not depress maize prices while cash transfers did not raise them. Using daily information on maize prices, and food and cash transfers from ten major markets during the height of the FIRP, we employ time series methods to analyze the properties of the series and model the formation of maize prices using autoregressive distributed lag models.

This paper contains spatial and intertemporal comparisons of multidimensional poverty and inequality in Malawi using two non-monetary dimensions, namely an asset index and child nutritional status. Through stochastic dominance tests, we establish that poverty and inequality are unambiguously higher in rural areas, the Southern region and households headed by females. We find, using decomposition analysis, that most poor people live in rural areas which make up 85% of total population. Poverty comparisons over time, between 1992 and 2010, show that poverty has significantly declined in Malawi and that these gains have largely been pro-poor in both absolute and relative terms. The paper shows that Malawi’s poverty profile is a ‘bad picture’ in the sense that almost half of the population is still poor but a ‘good movie’ in that the incidence of poverty has fallen from as high as 80%. Interestingly, we find that poverty and inequality estimates do not vary much across regions and areas...