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Umodzi Farms: Facilitating Smallholder Farmers’ Access to e-agriculture and Tracking of Farm Activities, Sustainability and Market Visibility

According to World Bank 2015 to 2019 reports, 80% of Malawi’s nearly 19 million people experience hunger and more than half live below poverty line. The most hunger and poverty striken households are smallholder farmers who constitute 90% of the rural population which forms 80% of the country’s population and 80% of agricultural workforce. Agriculture is the main pillar of the country. It employs 76.4 percent of the total population and contributes to 25.5 percent of GDP. Rain-fed maize is dominant, and tobacco has been the main cash crop contributing to over 50 percent of total export earnings, followed by tea and sugar. 

Despite several government and donor interventions including revision of National Agriculture Policy in 2016, majority of smallholder farmers in Malawi are still crippled by low productivity, produce market failures and subsequent recycled hunger and poverty. For instance, most of the communal irrigation, storage, processing and marketing structures that some farmers have been supported with for increased production and value addition to meet commercial levels and self-food sufficiency, remain under- or unused. Most notably, there has been low adoption of improved and sustainable farming technologies and inability to fully use grants and other commercialisation incentives such as farmer field schools and marketing cooperatives.