Assessment of systemic change in Malawi

Running of five years until 2019, the DFID-funded ‘Malawi Oil Seeds Sector Transformation’ (MOST) applied the market systems development approach in several product and supporting markets including cotton, sunflower, groundnuts, pesticides, seeds, inoculants and processing equipment.

Towards the end of the project we explored selected interventions with a particular focus on establishing the extent to which MOST had stimulated systemic change. We focussed on MOST’s efforts to introduce new contract farming models to the cotton sector and to introduce commercial production and distribution of inoculants. An exciting task which generated strong evidence of some genuinely large scale, sustainable and pro-poor impact.