In general, in all SIMLESA countries food and economic security is adversely threatened by a number of grand challenges. Not least are climatic challenges, but also institutional bottlenecks. For instance, in addition to flooding in some parts of Malawi in 2014, drought was experienced.
In 2016, in both Malawi and Mozambique, season, rains were too little, too late, due to the effects of El Nino. The same year (2016), Tanzania received excessive rains and a similar phenomenon of flooding was experienced in southern African countries in early 2017.
...An example of institutional capacity gaps was observed in Malawi.An important capacity gap had to do with limited experience of seed company
staff. Most seed companies’ staff involved in seed multiplication programs needed fair amount of constant backstopping.
The national systems (including the Department of Agricultural Research Services (DARS) had to help with this. The problem of overstretched national agriculture research system partners with limited number of new scientific corps coming into the system (has become somewhat chronic and typical in the region.
Within the SIMLESA program, improvements in experimental, data generation and scientific report writing capacity has been observed.A number of SIMLESA research by NARS scientists has been presented at international scientific conferences an example of which as shown in this video.