The Agricultural Services Project in Malawi is a smallholder food security project designed to help the resource-poor smallholder households (a large number of them food-insecure women headed households) that face substantial nutritional problems and produce on average only about 66% of their annual food requirements. IFAD is supporting measures to increase incomes and improve the food security, particularly of households that do not have access to high-value cash crops or to formal credit and input services. To this end, the project would promote sustainable, improved crop packages for barley, tobacco and maize and would enhance the traditional food base through the supply of planting material for cassava, sweet potato, various legumes and forage. To reduce production risks in these crops the project also promotes pilot schemes for tube well irrigation.