Flooding and prolonged dry spells are detrimental to agriculture and food security. In a country like Malawi, where people rely heavily on agriculture for their livelihoods, interventions to help the most stressed households that suffer from agricultural production shocks are often necessary. For a period in 2016/17, Malawi faced a drought-induced food security emergency which rendered about 6.7 million people in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. The Government of Malawi and its development partners designed the 2016/17 Food Insecurity Response Programme (FIRP) to meet the food needs of the affected households by providing them with cash and food transfers. Direct transfers have been shown to improve individual and household welfare in many ways from food security to psychosocial wellbeing. However, they are also susceptible to abuse for political purposes.
On Wednesday, 20th January, Jan Duchoslav, Research Fellow at IFPRI Malawi presented the results of a study on the targeting of the 2016/17 lean season transfers. He started by giving an overview of the targeting of FIRP transfers in 2016, which prevails to date with some modifications. The process starts with a food security assessment by the Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee (MVAC). MVAC makes recommendations on how many households in which areas can be expected to have a shortage of food, and when it is expected to start. Based on these recommendations, the Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DODMA) decides on the timing of the transfers and the number of beneficiaries at the Traditional Authority (TA) level. District officials then further divide these quotas from the TA level to smaller administrative units down to the village level. Community-based targeting is then used to allocate the village quotas to individual households. Given its complexity, this process may lend itself to manipulation at several levels. The study, co-authored by Edwin Kenamu and Jack Thunde, does not attempt to pinpoint at exact mechanisms of any such manipulation, but it does put forward evidence that electoral considerations play a role in FIRP targeting.
The authors combined data on transfers from the Fourth Integrated Household Survey with a remotely sensed measure of drought and with the results of the 2014 and 2019 parliamentary elections to answer the following research questions:
• Are transfers disproportionately targeted at ruling party strongholds to mobilize votes?
• Are transfers disproportionately targeted to marginal constituencies to swing voters?
• Do voters reward transfers by voting for ruling party candidates?
The results show that the transfers were targeted at the most drought-stressed areas as intended, but also disproportionately at marginal constituencies─ presumably in an attempt to convince swing voters to support ruling party candidates in the next elections. However, ruling party candidates in constituencies with many transfer beneficiaries in 2016/17 did not receive more votes in the 2019 elections than ruling party candidates in constituencies with few transfer beneficiaries. In other words, voters do not seem to reward transfers by voting for ruling party candidates. Or, more precisely, they do not reward transfers distributed in the middle of the electoral term. To find out whether voters respond to transfers distributed closer to an election, as some theoretical research suggests, currently unavailable data on lean season transfers from later years would be needed. Such data would also allow the researchers to determine whether the transfers become even more skewed to marginal constituencies closer to elections.
