WFP food-for-assets programme fill the gap

For now it is a road to nowhere, but not for long. Rose Nowa hopes that in about a month, the gravel road she and her neighbours are building will take their children to school safely and lead to greater development in the TA Makata district. TA Makata is a bumpy half-hour drive from Blantyre's city centre, but its 18,000 residents have not benefited from the city's relative wealth at all. It is rural. Almost no development has taken place in the years she can remember, says Nowa, who was born in the nearby Soche mountains which rise over Blantyre. However, earlier this year, the community's Area Development Committee, headed by the local traditional leader, decided to build a simple local school to prevent the children from walking up to 10 km to the nearest ones every morning. The community provided 20 percent of the resources needed to build the school, including bricks and labour. They had to carry the building equipment for several kilometres over hilly terrain because there was no road leading to the school. It prompted them to start building a road. "We had been hearing that there were development projects elsewhere. So we started building this road and in August the Blantyre District Assembly got involved," Nowa told IRIN. The road-building project is just one of many in Malawi's 14 districts which involves a partnership between the community, government and the UN World Food Programme (WFP). Described as a food-for-assets project, the people involved in building the road are paid with maize. The workers, mainly women, work about four hours a day, digging up rocks and shovelling sand. Every two weeks, each worker gets about 50 kg of maize for their labour. Nowa said the maize - in addition to the home-made brandy she brewed - helped her to feed the six children in her home. Two others moved in when their parents died of HIV/AIDS some months ago, Nowa said. She added that with bad maize and vegetable harvests this year, her community had survived "by the grace of God". This year, however, the building projects had helped families to feed themselves, she said. Smart Gwedemula, Director of Planning and Development in the Blantyre District Assembly, told IRIN an average of about 170 people were employed at each of about 12 such projects administered by the assembly. The steep gravel road stops abruptly at the top of the hill, but soon it will be finished. "The government is now implementing decentralised planning, which means that the people themselves have to come up with development initiatives. So the community themselves must wake up and decide what to do, but again the assemblies do not have enough financial resources to implement all the development projects in the area," he said, explaining the need for local and international donors to contribute. In fact, the work-for-assets projects supported by WFP had been so successful, said Abdelgadir Musallam Hamid, head of the WFP sub-office in Blantyre, that an increasing number of Malawians were interested in getting involved.

The steep gravel road stops abruptly at the top of the hill, but soon it will be finished.

"Because of the food shortages and high maize prices, and now since this is the lean season, over the last month or so, we have seen that demand has been very high for food-for-assets projects. There is an overwhelming attendance and demand for food-for-work. The project has been used as one of the coping mechanisms during the lean season. And I feel that even the amount of food that should be distributed in one year is not going to be enough. We are now considering revising the budget for this project," Hamid said. Stanford Nadalo, who supervises many of the projects, told IRIN that over the past three years, 58 classrooms, seven bridges and seven clinics for under-five children had been built in Blantyre's rural areas by harnessing community, government and donor resources. In addition, five new boreholes were sunk, he said. However, while some Malawians benefited from the projects, others had no access to food, said Hamid, adding that the agency was awaiting the results of a comprehensive food security assessment to decide on further intervention. "Once we have determined exactly what the food shortages are, we will decide if we need to take further action to prevent people from starving," he said.