This is a summary report of phase 1 of the project ‘Rooting out Hunger in Malawi with Nutritious Orange-fleshed Sweetpotato’ which was a 4.5 year project funded by Irish Aid from 1 October 2009 to 30 April 2014.

Rooting out Hunger in Malawi with Nutritious Orange-fleshed Sweetpotato was a 4.5 year project funded by Irish Aid from 1 October 2009 to 30 April 2014. By the end of the project, a total of 106,478 HH beneficiaries (Table 1) benefited from OFSP enriched vitamin A through the subsidized voucher scheme used by the Rooting out Hunger project in the last 4 years of project implementation. With a dynamic movement through awareness demand creation campaign through a number of radio/tv programs, sensitization, meetings, trainings, and advocacies to politicians and policy makers (Fig 1-3), the demand was high. Many organizations wanted to join the CIP-led program Rooting out Hunger to intervene OFSP in their community (Fig 4). It is recorded an additional 79,617 households received OFSP vine cuttings from other sources, i.e. bought by USAID-Mobi+lise project, Balaka Rural Development program, Kambalame Farm in Balaka through Machinga Agriculture Development Division (ADD), Evangelical Association of Malawi, World Vision Malawi, Great Lakes, CARLA/Climate Change Programme, Goal Malawi, one entrepreneur in Bvumbwe and some individual farmers. Together with the number of beneficiaries from associated partners (n=4,997 HHs; Table 2), a total number of Malawians who benefited from OFSP intervention are 191,092 households by end of the first phase of the CIP-led project funded by Irish Aid on 30th April 2014. A total of 4,131 agriculturists (extension and lead farmers, 45% women) were trained. In addition, over 24,000 farmers and extension (52% women) participated in training, field days and other sensitization activities.

The baseline survey was done in October 2010 and has been published (ref. Sindi et al., 2013). The report from the endline survey is 9 1 CIP, 2014. Rooting out Hunger in Malawi with Nutritious Orange-fleshed Sweetpotato: End of Phase 1 report, prepared for Irish Aid and submitted by CIP. 120pp. on its final stage, however, the evidence base results on the impact of this project has clearly seen on the increase of land covered by sweetpotato and OFSP, household wealth accumulation, etc. Table 5 presents information on the number of households growing OFSP and vine sales by each DVM reported by the 3 core NGOs, MVP, CU and CADECOM. In this Table 5, the information on DVMs and their revenues related to the household beneficiaries targeted by the NGO IPs. Tables 1 and 2 give the details on the number of household beneficiaries and DVMs in the 4 consecutive rainy seasons from 2010/11 to 2013/14 including numbers reported by the joint program partners. During the 2013/14 rainy season, the average income per DVM was USD 158 (Mk 66,360) through the subsidized voucher1 . The beneficiaries have also generated incomes from root and leaf sales, OFSP processed products. A number of case studies related to the additional income were included in the early midterm and annual project reports of the project.