Social Protection in Malawi: Poverty Targeting Mechanisms

Social Protection in Malawi

• Malawi has a poverty headcount of around 80% in some districts and ultra-poverty rates as high as 50% in others.
• The country's social protection system faces challenges in targeting the poorest 10% due to the lack of easily understood eligibility and targeting criteria.
• The government currently lacks M&E systems to adequately track implementation.

Social Cash Transfer (SCT) Programme

• The SCT has an estimated cost of 0.57% of GDP, covering 159,857 beneficiary households.
• The program aims to cover 10% of the poorest labor-constrained households in each district, with an estimated cost of 1.1% of 2015/16 GDP.
• The SCT faces challenges in targeting the poorest 10% due to the lack of easily understood eligibility and targeting criteria.

School Feeding Programmes

• School feeding programs primarily aim to improve enrollment and reduce drop-out rates, and under-nutrition must be tackled during a child's infant years.
• Implementers stress the vital link between provision of food and attendance at school, and between good nutrition and educational performance.
• School feeding is not implemented nationwide, with around 24% of 5,561 Malawian primary schools covered by one of the school meal programs.

Public Works Programmes (PWP)

• PWP operate on a seasonal basis as a safety net during the non-farming season, where few income-generating activities are available for poor Malawians.
• PWP focus on activities that support economic growth and increase resilience of local communities through forestry and irrigation programs.
• Districts and schools are targeted based on indicators of food insecurity, poverty, gender disparities in schooling, education outcomes, and malnutrition.
• PWP use self-targeting, where wages are set to be equal or below market wages for unskilled labor to ensure that projects only attract laborers with few other income-generating opportunities.

Challenges and Limitations

• Coverage varies significantly amongst age groups, with school-age children and working-age adults better covered than infants, pre-school children, and the elderly.
• Existing programmes provide insufficient protection to poor and vulnerable individuals.
• Inefficient targeting outcomes are due to community targeting combined with complex targeting criteria, widespread and deep poverty, and the prevalence of local politics.
• Administrative costs of Malawi's social protection programs are high, especially for PWP and the FISP, which reduces cost-efficiency.
• Lack of integration of social protection programs and limited exploitation of linkages hinder better coordination and harmonization.
• The limited coverage reduces the effectiveness of programs, and even though individual programs are found to have positive impacts on livelihoods, little progress has been made in reducing the country's extremely high levels of poverty.