1. Introduction
Poverty remains wide spread in many agrarian economies of sub-Saharan Africa where the majority
of the rural population rely on agriculture. Poverty levels have worsened due to low agricultural
productivity arising from the combined effects of low adoption of productivity-enhancing technologies
among the smallholder farmers and climate change that culminated into severe droughts and
floods. In Malawi for example, seven (7) major droughts and more than eighteen (18) floods occurred
between 1967 and 2008 affecting approximately 21.7 million people (Lunduka et al., 2010).
In economic terms, the country loses US$22 million or 1.7% of its gross domestic product (GDP)