IRIN interview with WFP official, Abdelgadir Hamid

The World Food Programme's (WF) food-for-assets initiative in Malawi aims to provide more than 11,000 mt of food to about 65,000 people over a two-year period. As Malawi's food shortages worsen, the projects have become more popular with rural Malawians forced to rely on maize as payment for their work. Abdelgadir Musallam Hamid, head of the WFP sub-office in Blantyre, told IRIN during an interview recently that the lean season in Malawi this year is particularly severe because of the cumulative effect floods, drought and high commercial maize prices are having on the impoverished country's poor. He explained why WFP decided to embark on its food-for-assets initiative and how it works. QUESTION: Describe the food-for-assets programme, how it was conceived and how it works. ANSWER: Traditionally, WFP used food-for-work programmes as a rehabilitation kind of intervention, during the transition period as we moved out of the emergency phase of a particular operation. In Malawi we are moving away from the emergency phase. It is only this year, in 2000/2001, that we had an emergency flood operation. Previously, over the last two years for example, the harvest has been fine and the food security situation has not been bad, so we have been trying to move more into development activities and development projects. That's why we came up with the idea of food-for-assets. It is like an improved version of what we started three years back 1998, which was the food-for-work programme, in the sense that we are looking more at sustainability issues, more at issues of quality and ownership, and more at using the development participatory approaches. It is simply to allow people to improve their food security situation themselves. We will try to assist people to come up with assets that are sustainable and that are going to assist them to earn their living on their own. We are talking about dams and small-scale irrigation projects, about soil and water conservation projects and also about road projects. Q: To what extent and how do you co-operate with the government? A: The government is the implementing partner in this programme. WFP donates and facilitates and provides technical assistance whenever and wherever there are gaps, but the government and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are the implementing partners. It is implemented by the local government department at central and district level. Q: How exactly does the food-for-assets programme work? A: WFP provides the food when the community works, and there is a certain formula we apply in consultation with government technical officers to work out how many work days are needed to complete a particular project or achieve a particular output. It is important to know that the work day is not like a commercial or business work day, it is only four hours. For this, beneficiaries get 3.5 kg of maize per day. The idea of having a four-hour work day is that we are trying to target poor segments of the population. We are just trying to assist them to have access to food, especially during the lean season. We try to target vulnerable groups, like female-headed households and we are trying not to overwork beneficiaries. It is not a question of exploiting beneficiaries. We try to make them work lightly because there are other activities they have to attend to. In addition, we provide the tools for them to do the job - the non-food items. Food alone cannot do it because there are some very technical projects, like the road projects. We also provide what we call operational funds. This is a funding package which we deposit at district level to allow the technical officers or the district level officers to get to the villages and to the remote areas to monitor and supervise the implementation of projects. Q: How does WFP monitor these funds, particularly in light of donor countries' concerns over corruption in the civil service? A: This is a tough, sensitive area, but we have lots of different strategies in place to deal with the efficient spending of funds. We release funds only based on projects that have been approved. So, if a certain district approves 10 or 15 micro-projects then they submit a budget to us, we revise that budget and approve a certain amount for them to implement the projects. We do not release all the money at once. When it is finished the implementing partner submits some kind of financial reconciliation for us, and based on this we release more funds. We have problems in the sense that the district assemblies (administrative authorities in rural areas) are not adequately funded by the central government. There are no funds to facilitate anything, not even to pay for stationery or anything, so we have to provide for everything sometimes. Normally we provide for fuel and for allowances, but sometimes we have to provide funds to maintain vehicles to ensure people are mobile to get to projects. It is difficult to work with the assemblies because they cannot top up what we do. Q: Are food for assets programmes primarily rural? A: Yes, but we are now piloting them in what we call urban centres in Blantyre and Lilongwe Q: It seems that mainly women are involved in the food-for-assets programmes in Malawi. Is there a specific reason for this? A: This is interesting. Women at household level are the ones who take care of the food security situation or budget. If there is no food in the home, it is the woman who goes out and works, so (in Malawi) this is not a responsibility of the man. So it is funny sometimes. You see women working on food-for-asset programmes ... but cash for work is more attractive for men. The other factor is that at WFP, we have a target. Since we know that women are the ones to suffer more if there is no food in the household, we try to give at least 55 percent of work opportunities to women. When you give a bag of maize to a woman, or to a mother, you ensure 100 percent that the food will be consumed by the family, whereas when you give it to men there are no guarantees that it will go to the family.