As part of the Ireland–Malawi Agrifood Systems Support Programme, SEI collaborated with Sustainable Food Systems Ireland (SFSI) to develop the Malawi Food Systems Transformation Tool as an interactive, web-based decision-support platform, hosted on SEI’s SDG Synergies system. Designed to drive coordinated and strategic action, the tool enables policymakers and stakeholders to visualize how goals across multiple policies interact, highlighting synergies and trade-offs.

The tool incorporates a curated and structured library of the policies in Malawi that are most relevant to achieving the nation’s objectives for transforming its food systems. Each policy is organized into Policy Priority Areas (PPA) and Policy Statements (PS). Some policies also include objectives, pillars, enablers, goals and key priority actions. The tool was designed for use by Government of Malawi officials and practitioners and was shaped by their direct feedback through an online survey, ensuring it reflects the realities of policy work on the ground.

Through interactive matrices, government officials and decision-makers can assess how progress in one policy area might influence, support or hinder progress in another. Using a robust cross-impact analysis methodology, the tool applies a seven-point scoring system, ranging from +3 (strongly supports) to –3 (strongly hinders), to score these interactions.

This visual representation of interlinkages allows policymakers to coordinate across sectors, identify high-impact actions and prioritize interventions that maximize synergies while mitigating trade-offs.

The most influential policies in the tool were the Malawi’s Vision: An Inclusively Wealthy and Self-reliant Nation (Malawi 2063) and the National Agriculture Policy (NAP). Based on the priorities of Malawi government experts, the tool includes all pillars and enablers from Malawi 2063. For the NAP, the tool captures all PPA and their associated PS. The PS identified in SEI’s previous network analysis of the NAP and the Food Systems Roadmap are also included (see Box 1).

Sectoral policies were also incorporated: the Irrigation Policy, the Fisheries and Aquaculture Policy, the Livestock Development Policy, the Agriculture Land Resources Management Policy and the Gender Policy. The PPA, PS and policy objectives are sequenced in the tool according to the priorities of the consulted experts.

The customized SDG Synergies platform for Malawi includes the SDG Synergies geographical spillovers feature. This feature is useful for seeing how policy interactions between areas may impact different scales (i.e. national, regional or international). The tool offers subspaces in the matrix (submatrices) corresponding to interactions between pairs of territories. This feature helps identify coordination mechanisms between scales, showing how progress or hindrance in food systems transformation objectives in one place can affect another.

In practice, government officials could use the tool to identify synergies and trade-offs between different policies, mapping where these agendas reinforce or conflict with each other and with Malawi’s broader food systems transformation goals. For instance, a policy team could similarly use it to assess how a national nutrition strategy interacts with local agricultural priorities, strengthening coherence across implementation levels. For those working across administrative boundaries, the geographic spillovers feature allows users to trace how policies interact from national to local levels.

The Malawi Food Systems Transformation Tool offers a practical and flexible platform that supports evidence-based decision-making for stakeholders involved in food systems policy. It allows users to select and combine policies across sectors, and tailor the analysis to their specific policy questions or priorities.