An accurate understanding of how input use affects agricultural productivity in smallholder farming systems is key to designing policies that can improve productivity, food security, and living standards in rural areas. Studies examining the relationships between agricultural productivity and...

A key challenge with poverty measurement is that household consumption data are often unavailable or infrequently collected or may be incomparable over time. In a development project setting, it is seldom feasible to collect full consumption data for estimating the poverty impacts. While...

A better understanding of how individual wealth and time use are linked - across paid, unpaid, and leisure activities - is important for targeting widespread gender inequalitiesin time allocation, as well as in accessing economic opportunities. The lack of reliable, individual-level data on...

Assets generate and help diversify income, alleviate liquidity constraints, and are key inputs into empowerment. Despite the importance of individual-level data on asset ownership, and the fact that most assets are owned by individuals, either solely or jointly, researchers typically collect...

Climate change is predicted to increase the frequency of extreme weather events, increasing the vulnerability of smallholder farmers dependent on rain-fed agriculture. We evaluate the extent to which farmers in Malawi suffer crop production losses due to extreme weather, and whether sustainable...

This article analyses the micro-level welfare impacts of agricultural productivity using a two-wave nationally representative, panel data from rural Malawi. Welfare is measured by various dimensions of poverty and food insecurity; and agricultural productivity is measured by maize yield and...

The contribution of women to labor in African agriculture is regularly quoted in the range of 60-80%. Using individual, plot-level labor input data from nationally representative household surveys across six Sub-Saharan African countries, this study estimates the average female labor share in...

Between 2014 and 2016 unprecedented and consecutive climatic shocks ravaged Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world. The largest ever emergency relief operation in the country's history ensued. The pathways and extent to which the humanitarian response protected livelihoods remain...

Traditional per capita measures of poverty assign the same poverty status to individuals living in the same household and overlook differences in living standards within households. There has been a long-standing need for a tool that enables poverty measurement at the individual level, while...