A long term research partner and one of the founding members of the Future Agricultures Consortium (FAC), based at the Institute of Development Studies, has been appointed as Minister of Local Government in Malawi.
More recently, Professor Blessings Chinsinga has been core to the Agricultural Policy Research in Africa (APRA) Malawi team. Together with FAC colleagues, he has conducted research on the political economy of agricultural policy, as well as on the politics of fertilizer subsidies, land investments and climate change.
Blessings is a political scientist with degrees from the Universities of Malawi, Cambridge and Mainz, and until his recent appointment was Professor at the Department of Political and Administrative studies at Chancellor College, University of Malawi and Director of the Centre for Social Research. His recent publications include APRA Working Paper 75: Agricultural Commercialisation and Rural Livelihoods in Malawi: A Historical and Contemporary Agrarian Inquiry
