Malawi

What are we funding?

GRANT AMOUNT

ENDORSEMENT DATE

ACTIVITIES

INSTRUMENTS SUPPORTED

WB PROJECT

US$21 million

October 3, 2019

Using disaster risk finance to make the social cash transfer program shock-responsive (i.e., capable of being scaled up in the event of a disaster).

US$ 610 M (approved on December 10, 2019)

For more than two decades, Malawi has invested in strengthening its social safety nets, which have kept the country’s poorest populations from falling further into poverty. Thanks to small regular payments provided through the flagship SCTP, families have not been forced to choose among essential household expenditures such as school fees or food. The financial resilience they have built remains tenuous, however. In 2019, the World Bank committed US$312.5 million in IDA lending to strengthen Malawi’s social safety net program.
A US$21 million GSFF grant has been instrumental in supporting two DRF instruments that allow Malawi’s flagship Social Cash Transfer Programme (SCTP) to scale up and be used for emergency response.
A US$21 million contingency fund, currently protects at least 1.2 million people from moderate droughts, while a US$11 million macro/ sovereign risk transfer instrument protects an additional 600,000 people from severe droughts for a period of two years.
Since grant inception, drought has led to three scale-ups of the SCTP, which have provided more than 236,000 households with emergency transfers totaling just under US$20 million.
The GSFF grant has supported the improvement of payment and registration systems for beneficiaries, as well as capacity building, legal reforms, and the codification of standard operating procedures for DRF instruments.