Project Success Stories

Malawi's Success with the CDD Approach

Malawi's statistics are grim: 11 million people, an HIV prevalence rate of 15 percent, life expectancy of 38 years, and an average person living on less than one dollar per day. Against these dire conditions, the Malawi Social Action Fund Project (MASAF) III provides much-needed support to roughly 20 percent of the Malawian population, based on well-established Community Driven Development (CDD) principles such as sustainability, community empowerment, and decentralization.

In the late 1990s over 30 communities in the City of Blantyre were seeking a way to make their health care project for HIV/AIDS patients sustainable. They decided to approach MASAF, which recognized the importance of community ownership and agreed to support the project as long as 5 percent of the sub-project cost was borne by households with persons affected by HIV/AIDS.

MASAF has now demonstrated how a public program that generates large amounts of social capital for vulnerable groups can expand and transform the capital base from social to economic. MASAF I started in 1996 with a total of $52.7 million in commitments. Having disbursed much faster than anticipated, the project continued into its second phase two years later with MASAF II, which started with $56.6 million committed. MASAF III began in November 2003 as a 12-year program with $60 million in the pipeline for the first three years. It is scheduled to end in 2015. The MASAF process has moved the project from being merely community based to a CDD oriented project

The change from a community based to a community driven project occurred with the realignment of the relationship among communities, local governments, and the central government. Communities had little trust in the old Malawian administrational structure, so in 2001 the government established newly elected local bodies and created a new structure of local authorities (LAs). In an effort to decentralize MASAF, LAs served as agents for the communities, which manage and operate all initiatives. According to Nginya Mungai Lenneiye, task team leader (TTL) for MASAF III, the CDD approach involves communities in a process that aligns people's priorities with their projects and with the priorities of the district government.

While community empowerment has been a success, the MASAF project had to deal with some real challenges, the greatest of which was realigning the center. MASAF has also faced the problems of the lack of timely, consistent information, which previously had caused dissension between the government and the LAs, and the lack of confidence in the the communities' ability to take responsibility for the projects. However, for almost ten years now, the people of Malawi, through MASAF, have been accountable for their own projects.

MASAF has been so much of a success that other countries have embraced and formulated similar projects tailored to the individual countries. In Tanzania, the president heard of the MASAF success, and asked the Malawi country team to assess what could be done in Tanzania. As a result of the visit, the Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF) was established and began implementation in November 2000.

According to Lenneiye, the next step for MASAF is to integrate the project into the government's thinking and planning. MASAF must make use of the momentum given by strong beneficiary assessment indicators, such as increasing enrollments in education, improving health and sanitary conditions, establishing more robust economic links between communities, and enhancing access to social services. These indicators can be achieved within and possibly beyond the CDD approach by mobilizing Malawian administration and institutions. Once this is accomplished, the Malawi people can join with Lenneiye in saying that "Even a poor country can have a success story."