Under the Resilient Food System (RFS) Programme, UNDP and AGRA co-designed three catalytic grant projects to pilot innovative approaches and model projects to showcase and develop practical methodologies of promoting Green Value Chain Development in East, Southern and West Africa. 

In Malawi, the catalytic grant project “Sustainable Agriculture Production and Marketing for Rural Transformation (SAPMaRT)” aimed to showcase a market-led and greening approach in the groundnut value chain food systems transformation pathway through catalysing system change at various levels of the value chain. The green production technologies promoted on this project included planting the groundnuts in double-rows as well as the intercropping of groundnuts with other cereals such as beans and maize, the use of drought and diseases tolerant seeds, the use of inoculants such as nitrofix - an affordable technology that is context relevant to smallholder farmers and is less expensive than conventional fertilizers, and Aflasafe for suppressing the level of aflatoxins in groundnuts. Ensuring consistent extension services facilitated the uptake/adoption of the promoted technologies. Smallholder groundnut producers were also trained to employ postharvest loss-reducing management practices, including the use of Tandala and Mandela cocks that are known to reduce the occurrence of aflatoxins.  

This case study documents the process of the implementation of the catalytic grant project. It puts together key lessons, success and/or failure factors, and outlines the project results as part of the process of documenting and disseminating information that can be used by multiple stakeholders including policy and decision-makers, project developers, funding agencies, and the private sector for widescale application of greening principles in food systems particularly in response to the challenges and impacts of climate change and environmental degradation.