chief, or traditional authority as a respondent. 98 percent had either one of the aforementioned leaders, a village chief counselor, or ADC/VDC member as a respondent. The leaders/members of religious entities, the leaders/members of community-based organizations/committees, and the business women/men made up 10.7, 9.9 and 8.3 percent of the focus group members, respectively. The roles of the rest of the 22 percent of all respondents were local headmaster/teacher (6.8 percent), health worker (3.5 percent), police (1.9 percent), agricultural extension staff (1.3 percent), political party leader/member (0.5 percent), and other (8.0 percent). 28 percent of the focus group respondents were women, with an average age of 45 years. On average, the respondents reported to have spent 79 percent of their lifetime in the community and 44 percent of them had at least a primary school diploma. The ethnic distribution of the respondents is in line with the dynamics of the rural Malawian general population. Given the findings reported in Table 1, we assume the focus group to represent leadership within the community.

The last set of variables informing our analyses originates from geospatial and administrative data that are mapped to the 628 rural EAs of interest. The geospatial data originate from a public data set that is available alongside the IHS3 raw data and that is at the household level, obtained by linking GPS-based household locations with public global geospatial data sets of varying degrees of resolution.<sup>10</sup> Given the resolution of the available global geospatial data, the geospatial variables that are derived at the household level exhibit limited variation within the EAs, if any. Nonetheless, community level geospatial variables are constructed by taking the median values of their household level counterparts in each community. Finally, four administrative variables are featured in the analysis, three of which are defined at the district level; these include the 2007/08 agricultural season per household measure of metric tons of subsidized fertilizer delivered to the district, the 2008/09 agricultural season per household measure of the total wages paid as part of the Malawi Social Action Fund (MASAF) that serves as a social safety net and a public works program, the 2008/09 agricultural season number of agricultural development projects operating in the district.<sup>11</sup> The fourth administrative variable has sub-district specificity and is defined at the extension planning area (EPA) level. This variable captures the number of farmer organizations operating in the EPA.<sup>12</sup> Table A1 in the Appendix maps all variables featured in the analysis to their sources.

> 10 The list of derived geospatial variables that accompany the IHS3 unit record data could be obtained here: <u>http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTLSMS/Resources/3358986-1233781970982/58009881271185595871/Geovariables.Description.pdf.</u>

> 11 This administrative data was compiled and shared with us by the EPIC project, led by the Agriculture and Development Economics Division (ESA) of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The data was collected from the Malawi Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security. The normalization of the administrative data by the number of households is based on the district-level estimates of household population that is obtained by aggregating the IHS3 household sampling weights at the district-level.

> 12 This data was provided by the Farmers Union of Malawi. An EPA is the basic operational and administrative unit for the extension system.

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