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Resilience in the Malawi agri-food system amid the COVID-19 crisis: Evidence from a 2021 nationally representative household survey
This report provides a farm-level analysis of the effects of the COVID-19 crisis, 12–15 months in, using a nationally representative rural household survey conducted in June–July 2021. We draw three major observations from the survey. First, farming activities, access to inputs and extension services, production, and sales were largely unaffected by the crisis. There were temporary challenges in accessing inputs during lockdown and mobility restrictions, and input prices and transportation costs increased; however, production and sales volume and value were largely unaffected. Second, although farming was not affected, other nonfarm livelihoods of a large proportion of farmers were negat...
Scaling up radio and ICTs for enhanced extension delivery and development impact: Quantitative baseline report
This report summarizes the baseline data that describe the rural population of five districts in Malawi targeted in the Scaling up Radio and ICTs for Enhanced Extension Delivery (SRIEED) II project that started in 2020 and ends in 2024. It also provides the impact evaluation strategy for the overall project as well as a causal impact evaluation of a major component of the project (impact ICT hubs).
Farmers' perspective on the implementation of the affordable inputs programme: Insights from nationally representative household and community surveys
This note provides an assessment of the first year of implementation of the Affordable Inputs Programme (AIP) from the perspective of rural households and communities in Malawi. The data come from a nationally representative panel survey of 2,449 rural households in 299 communities. At the household level, users of inorganic fertilizer, the amount applied per farmer, and productivity and production all increased in the 2020/21 cropping season compared to the 2015/16 and 2017/18 seasons. Almost all sampled communities reported more positive experiences with AIP than with the previous Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP), mainly because of the expanded coverage and greater number of beneficiari...
Employment risk and job-seeker performance
This paper examines the relationship between employment risk and job-seeker performance. To induce exogenous variation in employment risk, the outside options for job seekers undergoing a real recruitment process were randomized by assigning them a 0, 1, 5, 50, 75, or 100 percent chance of real alternative employment of the same duration and wage as the jobs for which they were applying. The findings show that job-seeker performance is highest and effort is lowest among those assigned the lowest employment risk (a guaranteed alternative job), and performance is lowest and effort highest among those facing the highest employment risk (those without any job guarantee). Moreover, a nonlinear relationship exists between employment risk and performance.
Measuring postharvest losses at the farm level in Malawi
Reducing food loss and waste are important policy objectives prominently featured in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. To optimally design interventions targeted at reducing losses, it is important to know where losses are concentrated between the farm and fork. This paper measures farmlevel postharvest losses for three main crops—maize, soy, and groundnuts—among 1,200 households in Malawi. Farmers answered a detailed questionnaire designed to learn about losses during harvest and transport, processing, and storage and which measures both total losses and reductions in crop quality. The findings indicate that fewer than half of households report suffering losses condit...
Can survey design reduce anchoring bias in recall data? Evidence from Malawi
Recall biases in retrospective survey data are widely considered to be pervasive and have important implications for effective agricultural research. In this paper, we leverage the survey design literature and test three strategies to attenuate mental anchoring in retrospective data collection: question order effects, retrieval cues, and aggregate (community) anchoring. We embed a survey design experiment in a longitudinal survey of smallholder farmers in Malawi and focus on anchoring bias in maize production and happiness exploiting differences between recalled and concurrent responses. We find that asking for retrospective data before concurrent data reduces recall bias by approximately 34% for maize production, a meaningful improvement with no increase in survey data collection costs. Retrieval cues are less successful in reducing the bias for maize reports and involve more data collection time, while community anchors can exacerbate the bias. Reversing the order of questions and retrieval cues do not help to ease the bias for happiness reports.
Recommendations and guidance on hepatitis C virus self-testing
WHO has set a global goal to eliminate HCV as a public health problem by 2030. WHO estimates that 58 million people had chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection globally in 2019, and less than a quarter of them were diagnosed. New and innovative approaches are needed to accelerate progress toward the HCV elimination targets. Self-testing is one such approach. These guidelines provide a new recommendation and guidance on HCV self-testing to complement existing HCV testing services in countries. These guidelines also highlight operational considerations to support strategic implementation and scale up of HCV self-testing.
Unleashing agriculture's potential for improved nutrition and health in Malawi: Conference report - 26-27 September 2011, Lilongwe, Malawi
This conference focused on how agricultural strategies can best be tailored to the Malawian context and result in improvements for nutrition and health. It is crucially important to make linkages--the best agricultural practices will not succeed in improving the nation's nutritional status if there is not good nutritional care and access to health services.
Anchoring Bias in Recall Data
Self-reported retrospective survey data is widely used in empirical work but may be subject to cognitive biases, even over relatively short recall periods. This paper examines the role of anchoring bias in self-reports of objective and subjective outcomes under recall. We use a unique panel-survey dataset of smallholder farmers from four countries in Central America collected over a period of three years. We exploit differences between recalled and concurrent responses to quantify the degree of mental anchoring in survey recall data. We assess whether respondents use their reported value for the most recent period as a cognitive heuristic when recalling the value from a previous period, while controlling for the value they reported earlier. The results show strong evidence of sizeable anchoring bias in self-reported retrospective indicators for both objective measures (income, wages, and working hours) and subjective measures (reports of happiness, health, stress, and well-being). We also generally observe a larger bias in response to negative changes for objective indicators and a larger bias in response to positive changes for subjective indicators.
