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Building Malawi’s capacity to implement social protection at national and district levels

Development Pathways is supporting GIZ to establish a consolidated social protection system under the MNSSP IIThe outskirts of Malawis capital of Lilongwe: The programme is to implement the vision to promote resilient livelihoods and protect against climate and other shocks

The Government of Malawi launched the Malawi National Social Support Programme 2018-2022 (MNSSP II) to implement the national vision to reduce poverty, promote resilient livelihoods and protect against shocks.

To support this, our Development Pathways team, in collaboration with GFA Consulting Group GmBH, worked with Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmBH to support the Government of Malawi to further consolidate the nation’s social protection system: by strengthening the capacity of district councils, improving the management of social protection programmes at the district level, and developing and enabling the implementation of appropriate instruments or mechanisms for the MNSSP II.

A big focus of the MNSSP II was to equip officials and administrators at central, district and local levels with the capacities and tools to enable them to better plan and implement social protection schemes. As such, our assignment for Malawi involved developing materials for a certificate training course on social protection, providing training to trainers and developing an overall social protection implementation manual for all the programmes within the MNSSP II.

The project also provided tools to harmonise delivery across the country. District councils used different systems and payment and grievance mechanisms, so our teams set out to develop a harmonised payment mechanism for a number of schemes and further develop the data management systems that underpins them – as well as developing integrated applications.

Our teams also provided support to national and district level officers on watershed management within the framework of public works programmes so as to better link social protection schemes with climate change resilience measures.

This project was implemented on behalf of the GIZ Social Protection Programme Malawi and funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the UK Department for International Development (DFID).

More on our work on systems, training and payments.