Poverty and Sustainable Livelihoods Malawi is a poor country even by regional standards in terms of human development, per capita income, life expectancy, combined gross enrolment or population living below US$1 a day. It is also one of the most densely populated countries. As a consequence, it ranks the least among neighbouring countries on the human development index and highest on the human poverty index. Moreover recent national surveys by the National Statistical Office (NSO) have shown that poverty has persisted overtime. Fighting against poverty has been and still is at the heart of the development agenda in Malawi. All major government development policies and strategies including the first Statement of Development Policies, second Statement of Development Policies, the Policy Framework for Poverty Alleviation Programme, the Malawi Vision 2020, the Malawi Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (MPRSP) and MGDS I and MGDS II have reducing poverty as their goal. Estimates of poverty rates in Malawi show that at least half of Malawi’s population is poor. It can be concluded that national policies and strategies seem not to have had significant impact on the overall levels of poverty and people’s livelihoods in Malawi.

 

Further, the absence of a formal social security system in the face of this pervasive poverty leaves the poor at the mercy of the ravages of the market and half-hearted government poverty alleviation policies and programmes. For example, before the structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in the 1980s, Malawi adopted market-based policies to protect the poor like price controls and subsidies for farm inputs. Even these were abandoned during the SAPs. Some form of assistance to the poor was introduced under government’s Poverty Alleviation Programme in 1994. Since then there have been CSO-led social support projects in the form of free food and agricultural inputs, and food or inputs for work in some areas and government nationwide free agricultural inputs. Since 2005 government introduced a subsdised inputs program in order to boost food security as part of the social security. Whether these programmes targeted the right people and achieved their objectives have been subject of a number of research projects. Establishing the efficacy of social support programmes remains one of the continuing research areas bearing in mind the resources devoted to them.

 

With this background, CSR has identified some research gaps within poverty and public policy that it will focus on during the next four years. Despite high economic growth and high profile policies and strategies, incidence and prevalence of poverty are still high. There is therefore a need to understand the transmission mechanism between the macro economy and poverty in Malawi in order to track down how and why the successes or failures in the macro economy are translated into living conditions. Related to this is the need to understand the link between poverty reduction policies, strategies and programmes and household living conditions in Malawi in order to explain why.

 

Another area that CSR will focus on is poverty analysis and will aim at providing independent estimates of poverty in Malawi. Further, there is need to develop a number of credible country specific poverty measures that take into account the views of Malawians whose living conditions is measured. In particular, there is need to involve Malawians to establish the poverty line if consumption expenditure continues to be used as the welfare measure. There is also need to supplement that measure with more progressive poverty measurement methodologies such as relative deprivation as practised under Breadline Britain where community groups are involved in coming up with goods and services that are considered necessary for an acceptable living standards for their households in their communities; and households in a national survey are involved in selecting goods and services they consider essential for an acceptable living standard in their communities.

 

The absence of poverty measures that resonate with the thinking of Malawians could explain some of the disjoint between officially reported poverty rates and self reported poverty rates. Again, the disjoint between what the officials consider as poverty and what communities consider as poverty could be responsible for the reported targeting errors commonly reported in Malawi social support programmes. In this area of targeting, there is need to establish the feasibility of targeting in a country where, depending on the definition of poverty and vulnerability, everyone is said to be poor. High targeting errors found in many social support programmes could also be a sign that communities find it difficult to target. However, there are cases of social support projects that yielded reasonable targeting errors. There is, therefore, a need to document best practices which can be learned for other programmes that may need to target.

 

Poverty studies will provide a framework for analysis of a much wider range of poverty related issues, including issues that are crucial for the design of strategies for the transition out of poverty. These include access to resources (such as land and credit), infrastructure, services and employment opportunities, for economic empowerment and sustainable livelihoods, as well as the development of human capital (improved education and health status). The Centre believes it is necessary also to focus more attention than in the past on the truly sociological dimensions of poverty, such as social structures and social organisation.