Malawi, with its subsistence-based economy, is particularly vulnerable to agricultural production shocks and has experienced recurrent food crises over the past two decades. These crises regularly trigger humanitarian responses during which hundreds of thousands of households receive aid in the form of direct food or cash transfers. The Food Insecurity Response Plan (FIRP), which sought to alleviate the crisis during the 2016/17 lean season, became the largest humanitarian effort in Malawi's history. Renamed the ‘Lean Season Food Insecurity Response Plan’ (LS-FIRP), the 2017/18 relief effort was far less extensive but still sizeable, reaching over 130,000 households.
Community-based targeting using pre-defined criteria has been employed in various forms in recent responses, but its effectiveness has been questioned. Research by IFPRI shows that Malawian households often share received aid with non-targeted households, even when aid distributors discourage such sharing. Widespread sharing may undermine the purpose of targeting – a costly and time intensive component of program planning and implementation. Dilution of assistance to targeted households reduces its impact on those households, further reducing the effectiveness of the intervention. Additionally, sharing, especially if coerced by those in positions of power such as chiefs, could be considered aid diversion.
On the other hand, sharing can also have positive impacts. It can reinforce support networks and reciprocal relationships within communities, creating informal social safety nets. These support structures may improve community resilience to shocks. This is significant in Malawi as government-led safety nets are currently unable to respond to shocks. Sharing can also partially correct mis-targeting of humanitarian assistance – be it a result of imperfectly designed targeting criteria or of poor adherence to said criteria.
In a recent IFPRI Malawi research seminar held on 5 September, "Inter-household sharing of humanitarian aid in Malawi," Jan Duchoslav, Associate Research Fellow at IFPRI Malawi, and Kenan Kalago, an IFPRI collaborator, presented the first results of a study which investigates how and why humanitarian aid is shared between households in rural Malawi. The study, carried out in the context of the 2017/18 LS-FIRP cash transfers, relied on qualitative data from focus group discussions and key informant interviews to find out how and why recipient households share relief aid with non-recipient households. Confirming anecdotal evidence, the study found that inter-household sharing of aid is widespread and serves as an informal social safety net. Additionally, sharing helps spread the aid to households which are considered equally vulnerable as the recipient ones with the communities. This can be facilitated by chiefs, who however also tend to impose sharing to enrich themselves or their kin.
Jan and Kenan proposed several policy measures to help curb the negative effects of sharing while keeping the beneficial ones. These include further limiting the involvement of local elites in targeting, promoting anonymity and privacy in targeting as well as aid distribution, simplifying the targeting criteria, and finally, increasing the number of beneficiaries while decreasing individual transfer amounts. The policy suggestions were discussed by the audience in a lively question and answer session which followed the presentation. The full study and analyses will be forthcoming shortly. The seminar presentation is available below.
