Located in Southern Africa, Malawi is landlocked, sharing its borders with Mozambique, Zambia, and Tanzania. We have been active in Malawi since the 1980’s, with activities reflecting institutional strengths in bean breeding and bean crop research.
To this day, Malawi remains the focal point for the Southern Africa Bean Research Network (SABRN), hosting the breeder for Southern Africa.
Work undertaken by the Alliance is well aligned with the Government of Malawi’s development objectives as laid out in Malawi’s development vision Agenda 2063, ‘An Inclusively Wealthy and self-Reliant Nation’. In Malawi, through our work promoting food security and economic development, we have strong ties with the Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Gender, Community Development and Social Welfare, Ministry of Trade and Industry and Ministry of Youth and Sports. Additionally, we also have strong ties with Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Our Malawi office also hosts HarvestPlus which commenced operations in 2016 with the aim of promoting the production, dissemination, and consumption of improved, climate smart, and nutritious biofortified staple crop varieties. HarvestPlus has developed strategic agricultural value chains to ensure a sustainable and profitable supply of biofortified foods to smallholder farming households and non-farm consumers including schools in Malawi.
Our nature of work has evolved in Malawi. Under the Pan African Bean Research Alliance (PABRA), our scope was expanded beyond bean breeding to include the development of multi-stakeholder platforms and bean processing or value addition. These workflows are aimed at engendering private sector development and long-term sustainability of interventions throughout the bean value chain.
