Food Insecurity Program in Malawi at Risk

After two major cyclones hit southern Malawi in four months, rural communities faced devastating crop losses and infrastructure damage during the leanest season of the year. In the aftermath of events like these, local leaders, government agencies, and global aid organizations need to know what’s happening on the ground in real time. Where is the situation most dire? Where will relief efforts make the most difference? And how do communities build resilience to withstand the next crisis?

“Data can answer these questions and save lives,” said Joanna Upton PhD ’15, a senior research associate in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management in the SC Johnson College of Business. “In fact, it already has.”

Since 2018, Upton has partnered with Catholic Relief Services and others to develop a rapid feedback monitoring system (RFMS), a platform that employs Malawi residents to collect information about food security from the same households every month. Through a large international network ranging from the World Bank to the Malawi University of Science and Technology, the program provides data and evidence that nonprofits, local leaders, and researchers use to respond to humanitarian emergencies, develop policies, and build resilience to future shocks. Following on early successes as a pilot program in Malawi, the platform has been adapted and launched in other countries, including Madagascar.

“These rural communities are highly vulnerable to climate shocks like droughts or floods, to annual lean seasons, to pests, and to macroeconomic disruptions that affect labor markets and food prices,” said Upton. “Understanding how these shocks affect well-being—and how to design policies and responses that build resilience—requires exactly the kind of high-frequency, grounded data collection and applied analysis that our project enables.”

But in January, federal funding for the project, which came through the U.S. Agency for International Development, ended. Now, the program’s future—and all the research based on it—is in jeopardy.

“All of the data collection systems for early warning and for food security assessment are disabled,” and ongoing research has been abruptly interrupted, Upton said.

‘I’m glad to be useful to my community’

“Imagine after planting maize we had to apply fertilizer hoping we would have the rains as usual, but now the maize is wilting,” a farmer told a major newspaper in Malawi in December after the first cyclone. “I spent a lot on seed and fertilizer but all to nothing. We are in trouble.”

In Malawi, up to 3.5 million people face chronic food insecurity. In 2024, a long drought “affected 44% of the maize crop and left 5.7 million people acutely food insecure,” according to the United Nations World Food Programme.

“In today’s era of overlapping crises—which in Malawi and Madagascar include the COVID-19 pandemic, tropical cyclones, repeated poor harvests, rising costs of living, and now the loss of U.S. foreign assistance—understanding how people not only cope, but also adapt and move forward is more urgent than ever,” said Elizabeth Tennant, senior research associate at the Dyson School.

At its peak, the Malawi monitoring program trained and employed more than 200 local data collectors, called enumerators, who visited 6,000 households such as this farmer’s every month. The enumerators asked about foods eaten; recent stressors like a death in the family or a job loss; and coping strategies such as skipping meals. Then, they recorded responses on phones or tablets and uploaded them to the researchers’ database. “I’m glad to be useful to my community,” said one enumerator.

This approach, built on trust and frequency, gives a level of detail and timeliness that one-off surveys can’t match—in part because averaging data across large areas or over time can hide specific problems.

The data are useful and actionable, Upton said. During the pandemic, researchers learned that some families had sold their last possession—a cooking pot—for food. That’s powerful testimony about the gravity of the situation, she said, and evidence that their project partner, Catholic Relief Services, could act on.

The data empower communities to act as well, and local leaders have used the evidence to petition for government resources for infrastructure. In one village, drought data led to a communal irrigation project. Another built a flood protection levee.

‘Losing the chance … is deeply frustrating’

Over time, researchers built a broad understanding of how rural communities cope with shocks and challenges. Farnaz Foroushani MS ’22, for example, used the data to study how rural households in Malawi use financial tools like credit, savings, and insurance—whether through banks or borrowing from neighbors—to survive challenges like crop failure. She found that these tools can be a lifeline during crises, and the benefits depend on how they’re used, who is using them, and when.

But unanswered questions abound. When fertilizer prices spike due to the war in Ukraine, how do communities half a world away adapt? When aid abruptly ends, does worsening food insecurity lead to emigration? How can satellite data, coupled with machine learning and other algorithms, forecast humanitarian crises at the local level?

“The RFMS is a rare source of longitudinal data that makes it possible to track how households recover from these shocks,” said Tennant. “With collaborators, I’ve been using it to study resilience and to explore how combining it with satellite-based geospatial data can strengthen early warning systems. These efforts are now at risk.”

Before the funding cuts, Foroushani planned to share data trends with communities through simple, visual comparisons with neighboring villages. She also hoped to develop an AI-powered decision-making system that would help policymakers identify the most vulnerable households and improve crisis response.

“Losing the chance to bring these ideas to life is deeply frustrating,” said Foroushani, a PhD student working with Upton and Christopher Barrett, Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management. “Beyond the setback to our work, it also represents a missed opportunity to channel international support more effectively, especially since food insecurity trajectories, not just levels, matter enormously and have lasting intergenerational consequences.”

‘All of these goals are still relevant’

“Now that the pool of resources for food aid is even smaller, the information we can provide is even more important,” Upton said. “That’s because the smaller the resources are relative to the need, the more important it is to identify those most in need.”

Upton is currently keeping the project on “life support,” attempting to maintain the project infrastructure in Malawi with very limited funds. “We have this entire trained team of staff, and if we don’t keep that going, we lose it. It’s taken many, many years to build a system that was that efficient and useful, and now I’m trying to keep the enumerators functioning and collect some data at a lesser frequency.”

Upton and her colleagues are activating their networks to find alternative funding.

“Our work aimed to make humanitarian aid more efficient and better targeted by improving understanding of local conditions,” Upton said. “And if you ask me, providing aid is purely a moral obligation where wealthy countries should help poorer countries. We also need these countries for their resources, for their skills, for their labor, and hence there’s self interest in providing assistance in the whole notion of soft diplomacy. All of these goals are still relevant.”