The social protection policy in Malawi: processes, politics and challenges

For a period of nearly 20 years, Malawi’s economy has been characteristically unstable. Since 1981, the country’s economy has experienced boom and bust style growth patterns underpinned by rising levels of inflation, declining agricultural activity, rising interest rates, and spirals in both domestic and external debt. The country’s staggering debt, however, has since been written off under the HIPC scheme.

Malawi is heavily donor dependent. It is estimated that donors provide up to 80 per cent of the country’s development budget and about 50 per cent of its recurrent expenditure. Official development assistance in Malawi is projected at 35 USD per capita, whilst development assistance accounts for about 27 per cent of the GNP. Thus, without donor support, the magnitude of the government’s deficit is quite overwhelming.

This paper is based on a study undertaken to critically understand the dynamics of policy-making and processes under the auspices of the Future Agricultures Consortium’s (FAC) sub-theme on politics and policy processes, hosted by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in the United Kingdom.

This study reveals three main things, namely:

1. that the social protection policy process is being treated entirely as a technical process
2. the lack of capacity among leading government agencies to provide the necessary leadership and technical guidance and direction to the policy process
3. the fact that policy design has so far been totally driven and determined by donor agencies, particularly DFID and the World Bank.
   

The author draws several conclusions, including the following:

• The democratisation of the political system potentially provides more opportunities for the participation of a wide range of stakeholders in the policy-making processes, but these opportunities are barely utilised due to the enduring legacy of the technocratic policy-making and dictatorship which has left citizens without the habit or means of voicing their views on government policy.
• While policy-making is essentially technocratic in nature, it is clear that the capacity of the executive organs to firmly steer the policy process is quite limited, invariably paving way for donor dominance.
• There is a need to institutionalise and widen the participatory policy processes in order to address issues of poverty, deprivation, exclusion and the promotion of human rights and good governance.