AIP Targets 490,449 farming households in Lilongwe

AIP products

* The beneficiary farming households will be identified and pre-listed from their farmer groups

* Before a screening process at the Ministry of Agriculture

* With an aim of ensuring that only those in active farming activities do benefit

Nellie Kapatuka, MANA

Lilongwe District Council agriculture cluster chairperson, Councillor Mathia Kavala says 490,449 farming households will benefit from the Malawi government Affordable Inputs Program (AIP) during the 2022-2023 farming season.

Speaking during a full Council meeting on Tuesday, the chairperson said out of the targeted number, 208,543 and 281,906 farming households will be taken from Lilongwe East and West respectively.

The beneficiary farming households will be identified and pre-listed from their farmer groups before a screening process at the Ministry of Agriculture, with an aim of ensuring that only those in active farming activities do benefit.

“According to the guidelines that have been provided, these households should possess, at least, a field of approximately 0.4 hectares,” he said.

Member of Parliament for Lilongwe Central Constituency and Minister of Agriculture, Lobin Lowe, emphasized on governments efforts in bringing sanity in the AIP.

He said government has deliberately given farmer clubs the authority to pre-list their member farmers for the program to ensure it is only farmers who are to benefit from the program.

“There were lots of challenges in this program with a lot of people selling their national ID’s simply because of the poor targeting systems that were being used in beneficiary identification,” Lowe said.

Among other guidelines, beneficiaries of the Climate Smart Enhanced Public Works Program will not benefit from the AIP program and this year, farmers will be expected to make a K15,000 contribution to a 50kg bag of fertilizer with the government contributing MK40,000 and MK5,000 for cereal seed pack.