Our mandate
At the core of our mandate is ‘to promote and undertake applied social science research including conducting monitoring and evaluation of development programmes so as to generate information on priority problems of the country and the region’
"Centre for Social Research (CSR) is an organ of the University of Malawi that conducts and promotes excellence in academic and applied social science research in partnership with the public and private sectors so as to inform policy and offer training for capacity building".
CSR has been and is still Malawi's leading social science research and consulting institution since 1978. Our research and training programmes are development oriented to suit the everchanging policy environment in Malawi and sub-Saharan Africa
Members:
Resources
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2The village head and the problem of role relevance in the context of declining rural land availability in Malawi
Village heads form the access point to customary land in Malawi. Rapid population growth and agricultural policies that favoured large scale commercial agriculture and permitted the conversion of customary land to private tenure have combined to create land scarcity in Malawi's subsistence sector and consequently affected the role of village heads in land administration, diminishing their status.
Malawi's settlement schemes: rural towns that failed to take off
In the late 1960s the Malawi government established irrigated settlement schemes throughout the country with the goal of promoting the production of rice for export to raise farmers' incomes. A supplementary objective was to promote the development of a sense of nationhood among people of different ethnic backgrounds settled on the schemes. The permanent settlement of people and their investment of surplus incomes in the local economy was envisaged to spur the growth of rural towns.