Country Report — Malawi. Nairobi: CIMMYT.

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 CSIR/SARI, IITA, other partners, and/or donors.

The objective of this research is to establish a baseline in areas of DTMA project intervention in terms of standard of living of households, adoption of new varieties of maize and adaptation to natural disasters. This work will help to appreciate better the impact of the interventions of DTMA project by providing a basis for comparison. This document presents a summary of the baseline surveys conducted in the villages of Kandi and Tanguieta in northern Benin with 175 randomly selected farms.

This report presents the results from the household survey for the DTMA project in the northern region of Ghana. The principal objective of the household assessment is to describe and explain current conditions in the project area.

The purpose of the study is to provide both quantitative and qualitative feedback from farmers to researchers and to the B&MGF on the impact that improved maize varieties developed in the past have had upon the livelihoods of households and to provide a detailed database for the projection of expected outcomes with the deployment of new drought tolerant maize varieties under the B&MGF drought tolerant maize project.

Based on the need to understand how and when DTM is used by farmers, the number of users over time, the provision of information for policy reform, as well as the need to measure impact, a formal household survey of resource-poor farmers was conducted during the 2005–2006 production periods. The survey was targeted at major maize producing areas that were frequently at drought risk. The general objective of the household survey was to collect baseline data on farm households and use them to construct indicators for measuring changes in the adoption of improved maize varieties and the impact on adopting households in selected locations.