Flanders Government provides continued support for WFP's resilience interventions in Malawi
LILONGWE - The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) welcomes a new contribution of EUR 2.3 million from the Flanders Government in Belgium which will help WFP reach an additional 100,000 smallholder farmers increasing their crop production and food consumption and building resilience to climatic shocks.
The contribution is a continuation of funding for the Integrated Risk Management Programme that reaches out to smallholder farmers with climate-smart interventions, weather information services, micro-insurance against hostile weather conditions and links farmers to markets.
“We want to sustain the achievements made in phase one of the programme and expand our scale to reach out to more vulnerable farmers to free them from the vicious cycle of hunger and poverty,” said Simon Calcoen, Policy Officer - International Development Cooperation, of the Flanders Government.
In phase one, smallholder farmers benefited from climate, weather and agricultural information, mitigation of adverse weather and climate risks through micro-insurance and credit and savings services including Village Savings and Loans (VSL) to boost income diversification.
The programme has seen over 40,000 in three districts of Chikwawa, Blantyre and Mangochi improve their farming techniques, build their resilience to climatic shocks, access micro credit and savings services to diversify their livelihoods, and triple their food production.
“This support will enable us to scale up our integrated resilience support from 3 districts of Chikwawa, Blantyre and Mangochi supported in phase one to 5 new districts of Nsanje, Zomba, Machinga, Balaka and Phalombe,” said Benoit Thiry, WFP Representative in Malawi. “In the process, we will change lives of more than 100,000 farmers from food shortage and malnutrition to food abundance and resilient communities. For this, we are very grateful to the Flanders Government.”
In addition to continued implementation of phase 1 activities in all the 8 districts, in phase 2, WFP will equip smallholder farmers with business skills and use of marketing platforms including use of SMS to transmit crop market prices to farmers and skills to handle and store harvested crops to reduce post-harvest losses.
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The United Nations World Food Programme is the world’s largest humanitarian organization, saving lives in emergencies, building prosperity and supporting a sustainable future for people recovering from conflict, disasters and the impact of climate change.
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