Malawi is a landlocked country in southern Africa bordered by Tanzania, Mozambique, and Zambia and covers an area of about 118,000 km2. The country is a member of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) communities in addition to being part of the African Union (AU). It has a population of approximately 14 million people of which 51% are women. The country has one of the highest population densities in Africa and a population growth rate of about 2.4% (GoM 2005a). 
Malawi’s progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) has been limited by the spread of HIV/AIDS and the inadequacy of the structural adjustment programs implemented in the 1980s and 1990s to create the conditions for broad-based economic growth. To learn from past mistakes and achieve meaningful poverty reduction, the government launched the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy (MGDS) in 2006. The ﬁ ve central pillars of the strategy are: sustainable economic growth, social development, infrastructure development, protection for the most vulnerable, and good governance.
Malawi’s economy is dependent on agriculture as the country has very few exploitable mineral resources. Agriculture, representing 39% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), accounts for more than 80% of the labor force and about 80% of all exports (USAID 2007). The current GDP per capita is about US$170 and the latest human development index is 0.388, showing that close to two thirds of the population live in poverty, the majority of whom are women. According to the Integrated Household Survey of 2004/05 (GoM 2005a),the current status of poverty shows that 52.4% of the population lives below the poverty line; ie, about 6.3 million Malawians are poor, with the poorest people living in the southern region and with rural areas poorer than urban (where poverty rates are at 25%). The socioeconomic indicators of the poor are low, with food security being a continuing threat to better life. Income inequality as measured by the Gini coefﬁ cient stands at 0.52 for urban areas and 0.37 for rural areas, meaning that income inequality is very high (GoM 2007).
