The Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DoDMA) has rolled out the training of the District Councils and Local Committees on the Lean Season Food Insecurity Response Programme (LS-FIRP), targeting food-insecure populations as projected by the Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee (MVAC).
The training is being conducted in several districts and in Lilongwe, it is being held at the Bwaila Secondary School as one of preventing the challenges that the program used to face in previous years.
Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee (MVAC) last year projected that 3.8 million people would be food insecure in 27 districts and four cities of the country, leading to the development of the (LS-FIRP) to assist in resource mobilization and guide the response intervention, but this year,, the targeted population has been hiked to 5.7 Million.
Speaking during the opening of the training on Thursday, Commissioner for the Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DoDMA) Reverend Charles Kalemba, said the main aim of the training is to make sure that the previous challenges, such as miss-targeting, distribution, integrity, and theft are.
Kalemba said the department is looking forward to a smooth implementation of the programme after the two-day training saying only those who are vulnerable people must be the beneficiaries of the programme.
“We have brought all people who are stakeholders in this process in all the councils in the country so that we discuss and refresh all the procedures that we are supposed to follow for us to be able to have a clean and smooth ride when it comes to the lean season response programme.
“We want those people who are vulnerable to benefit from the programme. We have had cases where you find people who are well to do and have received the relief items when those who are vulnerable have not received them. That type of happening should not be there,” he said.
Kalemba said leaders will be preached with the message of integrity during the implementation of the programme this season as they don’t want to register cases of theft among leaders.
“We don’t want to be hearing leaders stealing things that are meant for the poor, we need to have proper logistical arrangements so that we don’t have disruption during the implementation of the Programme,” he added.
Lilongwe District Council Chief Executive Officer McCloud Kadam’manja commended DoDOMA for the training, saying it will help the committee members on how they can manage the issues with the Disaster Manager.
“It is a very important training because it will prepare us as a secretariat and the teams that work on the ground, Disaster Risk Management Committee Members. We have had so many challenges, but with constant orientation and training sessions from Dodoma,, we have been able to alert people on how to do with issues of Disaster Risk Management,” he said.
Agatha Augustino Chitengu, Chairperson of the WCPC Kaliyeka Ward, who is one of the leaders undergoing the training, said the development will guide them on how to discharge their duties as committee members smoothly.
“We have had issues of people receiving the relief items, yet they are not vulnerable; this has been happening because maybe due to lack of knowledge, and this training will help to bridge that gap,” she said.
This Lean Season Food Insecurity Response Plan (LS-FIRP), developed by the Government of Malawi in collaboration with its humanitarian partners leveraging the architecture of the humanitarian cluster system, identifies Food Security, Nutrition, Protection, Education and Transport and Logistics clusters as the key priority clusters to address immediate needs.
World Bank, UK Government, Germany Government, Morocco Government, and Ireland Governments are the major donors of the program supplementing the Malawi Government’s effort to ensure that citizens are food secure.
The Programme will swallow about USD 240 Million and DoDOMA says about 70% of the resources have been sourced and can fully implement the programme for the first three months and they are hopeful of securing the remaining resources.
In March this year, m His Excellency the President, Dr Lazarus Chakwera declared a state of disaster in 23 of Malawi’s 28 districts in anticipation of a poor harvest caused by the El Niño climatic event which brought about spells of dry weather across much of southern Africa, leading to poor agronomic conditions in the current growing season and likely below-average harvests.
While the amount of food crops that Malawian farmers have harvested cannot yet be exactly determined, it is clearly not sufficient to meet the country’s food needs for the remainder of the year .
The poor harvest has come at a time when households’ resilience to shocks has already been severely eroded over two years of compounding shocks. At least 4.4 million people in Malawi (22% of the population) are currently experiencing crisis levels of food insecurity.
Underproduction at such a precarious time threatens to make the next lean season in 2024/25 exceptionally dire. More people than usual will require assistance for longer than usual.
While the president Chakwera estimated that 600,000 tons of maize will be required for lean season assistance may be on the higher side (such amount of maize would feed 9 million people for 6 months), the requirement will certainly be larger than in recent years.
