Characterization of maize producing households in Monze and Kalomo districts in Zambia

Characterization of maize producing households in Masvingo and Bikita districts in Zimbabwe

Characterization of maize producing households in Machakos and Makueni districts in Kenya

An innovation learning platform for drought tolerant maize in Malawi: lessons learned and the way forward

Characterization of maize producing households in Balaka and Mangochi districts in Malawi

Characterization of maize producing households in Nakasongola and Soroti districts in Uganda

Characterization of maize producing households in Adami Tulu-Jido Kombolcha and Adama districts in Ethiopia

Characterization of maize production sub-systems in Mossourize and Sussungenga districts, Manica, Mozambique

We are very grateful for the financial support of the BMGF and HGDF that made all the studies and this synthesis possible. We are also very grateful for the leading national partners; namely, Manuvanga Kiakanua (Angola), Samson Katengezah and Julius Mangisoni (Malawi), Rafael Uaiene (Mozambique), Thomson Kalinda (Zambia), and Shamiso Chikobvu (Zimbabwe), for the indulgence and commitment they have shown in undertaking the national level surveys. We would like to appreciate the support we received from CIMMYT’s Southern Africa Regional Office staff while organizing and undertaking “Data Analysis and Report Writing” workshop to speed up finalization of the country level reports that ended up very successfully. This report has benefited from the valuable comments of different colleagues. We are particularly grateful to the comments and suggestions of Dr Menale Kassie and Dr Surabhi Mittal of Socioeconomic s program at CIMMYT. Their meticulous reviews have made the report much more readable. We also appreciate the contributions of Dr Hugo De Groote and Mrs Janin Trinidad who are coordinating the working paper publication in the Socio-Economics Program of CIMMYT. This report was finally edited and formatted by Mr Wandera Ojanji, Science Editor at CIMMYT Kenya. We thank him for his excellent work. This report is presented without a thorough peer review with the main purpose of making data and information rapidly available to research teams and partners in the Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa (DTMA) project and for use in developing future, peer-reviewed publications. Readers are invited to send comments directly to the corresponding author(s). The views expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect opinions of CIMMYT, other partners, or donors. All errors and viewpoints in this report remain to be ours and are not shared with any individual or institution.

Agriculture in eastern Africa is predominantly rainfed and maize is a major food crop, primarily produced for home consumption and the market by small-scale family farms. The study characterized farm households in the drought prone maize growing areas of eastern Africa synthesizing data from parallel household surveys in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. The study provides a comparative analysis of the farm households’ assets, livelihood strategies and crop management practices, with an emphasis on maize and maize seed. This illustrates how farmers in a similar agro-ecological environment but with different socio-economic and institutional settings have variously adapted to living with drought and how the inherent weather risk co-determines the livelihood portfolio, agricultural intensification incentives and system development pathways. The study thereby illustrates the challenges for agricultural intensification in such drought prone environments and the scope for drought tolerant maize varieties and explores the research and development implications.

Characterization of maize producing households in Manyoni and Chamwino districts in Tanzania

This study provides a detailed analysis of the extent and determinants of poverty in the maize-based rural economies of selected districts in southern African countries of Angola, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia. Poverty profiles showed that households that were absolutely poor had significantly smaller family sizes, fewer livestock, smaller farm sizes, smaller number of illiterate household members, and less number of important assets such as phones and radios. The study also details the extent and determinants of poverty in the study countries using quantile regression. The importance of maize technology use and resource allocation to the crop in determining the magnitude of poverty is an important finding as the sampled households were essentially semi-subsistent with limited market orientation. This finding also justifies the effort being exerted on the development and deployment of maize and maize-related technologies in rural communities of southern Africa.

Maize is an important crop in the livelihood of Zambia’s most vulnerable populations. A huge challenge facing most of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries like Zambia is to increase maize productivity of smallholder farmers, which has remained very low over the past decades. Through various breeding programmes, more than 50 new maize hybrids and open-pollinated varieties have been developed and provided to the farmers through seed companies and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). However, the extent to which such varieties have been adopted remains unknown. The purpose of this study was to characterize the maize producing households and to assess adoption of improved maize varieties. Data were collected from randomly selected households in the maize- producing areas of Monze and Kalomo Districts in southern Zambia. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) on asset ownership was used to generate a wealth index used to rank the survey households. The results confirm that poorly endowed households, most of whom are female-headed, are far less likely to adopt improved varieties than their well-off counterparts. Important maize variety attributes sought by farmers include early maturity (85% of households), tolerance to water stress (83%), yield potential (79%), pest/disease resistance (56%), better processing quality (56%) and cob/grain size (50%). A larger proportion of well endowed households planted improved varieties, compared with their poorly endowed counterparts. These findings suggest that moving the poor households and female-headed households up the wealth ladder poses a considerable challenge and calls for targeting the key factors that could potentially improve their welfare.

Quality protein maize (QPM) technology is relatively new in Zimbabwe and farmer awareness of QPM was low. Participation of smallholder farmers in the development of QPM breeding objectives and dissemination strategies was solicited through participatory rural appraisal (PRA) techniques. Seventy two farmers participated; the farmers were involved in the Mother Baby Trial (MBT) projects in four selected villages from three districts of Zimbabwe. Data collection techniques included work-sharing, village or resource mapping, Venn diagramming, semi structured interviewing, matrix scoring and ranking and pairwise ranking. The results suggested that protein malnutrition was prevalent in the districts. Maize was the most important crop and farmers grew three types of maize, namely landrace ("Hickory King"), open pollinated varieties (OPV) and hybrid varieties all representing normal endosperm maize. Hybrids were dominant and produced mainly for sale, while "Hickory King", although not supported by the formal seed system, continued to be produced for home consumption because of its superior taste, white kernel color, large kernel size, high kernel density, kernel hardness, and perceived weevil-resistance. Lateness and foliar disease susceptibility were the disadvantages of Hickory King. The ideal maize variety should be early-maturing, with a high yield potential, drought tolerant, foliar disease resistant and stem borer tolerant. For any QPM variety to be acceptable, farmers expected it to combine the agronomic attributes of hybrids and the grain quality characteristics of "Hickory King", an "heirloom" variety. To effectively promote the adoption of QPM, the Agricultural Research and Extension (AREX) arm of government was the farmers' choice compared to other modes of information dissemination which were radio, television, newspaper, church NGO and councillor.

The main objectives of this study were to document the level of access to assets; the livelihood strategies utilized; the shocks or risks faced and the coping mechanisms utilized by rural households in southern Zambia. Data was collected from 350 randomly chosen households in Monze and Kalomo districts. Quantitative and qualitative data collected from the survey was analyzed using descriptive statistics. The results indicate that distribution of livelihood assets in the study area are skewed by wealth showing that the majority of the production resources are owned by a few (27%) of the well-endowed households who owned more key assets like livestock and had greater access to land as compared to the poor. The results also showed that the households are diversifying their livelihood strategies among different asset combinations and activities. Crop farming, livestock rearing and petty trading are some of the major livelihood strategies being employed. Rainfall variability as manifested in droughts and erratic rainfall patterns was identified as a major shock and the most critical source of risk and vulnerability which has been causing frequent production losses and seasonal food shortages among the households. The households are engaging in various activities to cope with the various stresses and shocks. Livestock selling was one of the most effective strategies to ameliorate hunger. However the livestock herds have been dwindling in the past two decades due to disease outbreaks. Households are also depending more on food aid than in any other activity for survival.

This paper discusses drought risk perception and management in five southern African countries. A sample of 1108 households was randomly drawn with different sample sizes across countries. Data generated were analyzed using descriptive statistics and non-parametric statistical models. Drought was reported to be the most important livelihood challenge in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, whereas it was indicated to be second, next to sickness and mortality of a family member, in Angola and Mozambique. Maize varieties in general and improved open pollinated and hybrid varieties in particular are being considered very risky in terms of predictability and reliability of yield levels. Given the importance of maize and the vulnerability of the farming communities in the region, this implies that drought and risks associated to it will have paramount and potentially irreversible consequences in the poor sections of the region. Despite the fact that yield size is among the most preferred traits, farmers’ strong reference to maize as a risky crop urges refocusing breeding activities to generation of germplasms with reliable yield distribution. Farmers have also shown strong interest in drought tolerance, early maturity, and good performance under poor rainfall traits of maize implying to the need for targeted breeding

This study identifies the determinants of adoption and adoption-intensity of improved maize varieties in Malawi. We estimated a double hurdle model based on household-level survey data collected in the districts of Balaka and Mangochi in 2008 and found that labour endowment, access to rural credit, livestock wealth, access to agricultural extension, farm size and access to off-farm employment all significantly increase the likelihood of adoption. Households where the head had membership of a social group were also found to be less likely to have adopted. The intensity of adoption was found to be negatively related to livestock wealth and fertilizer use. Conversely, the age of the household head, the labour endowment of the household and the proportion of household members engaged in off-farm activities were factors that were found to be positively related to intensity of adoption. The study suggests the need to enhance adoption and intensity of adoption of improved maize varieties in Malawi among other things improving access to rural finance through credit and improving access to agricultural extension. Agricultural extension enhances provision of timely and quality agricultural information which is vital to smallholder farmers’ production and marketing decisions and hence, key to decisions to adopt new and improved technologies such as improved maize varieties.

The quality of maize stored using sack and roof storage methods was studied by investigating the presence of Fusarium, Aspergillus and Penicillium infections using qualitative methods in 130 maize samples that were randomly collected from the roof and sack storage facilities in Katumba ward, Rungwe district, Tanzania. Levels of fumonisins, aflatoxins, ochratoxins and T-2 toxins were determined using quantitative methods on selected 77 maize samples. It was found that 86% of the selected maize samples were infected by one, two or all of the three pathogenic fungi investigated, whereas 88% were contaminated by one, two or three types of the investigated mycotoxins. The average concentrations of the mycotoxins were as follows: 596.48 ± 38.85 μg/kg of aflatoxins, 745.73 ± 105.57 μg/kg of ochratoxins 87717.95 ± 14984.32 µg/kg (or 87.2 ± 15 mg/kg) of fumonisins, and 1803.77 ± 244.56 µg/kg (or 1.8 ± 0.241 mg/kg) of T-2 toxins. The concentrations of the mycotoxins were a lot higher than the internationally accepted levels. These observations indicated that in Katumba ward, maize stored using roof and sack storage methods was exposed to infection by Fusarium, Aspergillus and Penicillium species, and that the farm households were at risk of ill health due to the mycotoxins. Key words: Maize, storage, quality, fungi, mycotoxins, food security

To reduce their dependence on subsistence agriculture, farm households in rural Africa may diversify their income sources by participating in the nonfarm sector. In years of drought, nonfarm income can also be part of the coping strategies. A multivariate sample selection model was used to analyze three years of data from a nationally representative household survey in Mozambique. The analysis was guided by the following three questions. During a drought year: (1) Do households increase their participation in nonfarm activities? (2) Are poorer households as likely as others to participate in and benefit from nonfarm activities? and (3) Which factors are associated with higher nonfarm incomes? The results suggest that households are more likely to engage in at least one nonfarm income-generating activity during a drought year. Although poorer households are more likely to engage in nonfarm activities, they are less likely to participate in nonfarm activities of high return. The results suggest that policies reducing entry barriers (e.g., improved road infrastructure, micro-credit schemes, and livestock promotion programs) and increasing education levels can facilitate income diversification, thus allowing rural households to better cope with the effects of drought. When designing polices, care must be taken to avoid exacerbating income inequality by targeting measures toward poorer and female-headed households.