The Government of Malawi’s Social Cash Transfer Scheme

The GoM’s SCT scheme is currently (July 2010) operational in 7 districts and reaches 24,051 ultra-poor and labour-constrained households and approximately 95,000 individuals. The scheme began as a pilot in 2006-07 in one district, Mchinji, and was subsequently endorsed by Cabinet for scale-up to a further 6 districts. The program is fully executed by the GoM. At the national level the scheme falls under the Ministry of Gender, Children & Community Development while at the local level it is wholly executed by District Assembly and Social Welfare Officers under the supervision of the District Commissioner’s Office. Funding for the transfers is provided through the National AIDS Commission (NAC); technical assistance in design and implementation, and training and capacity strengthening of district officers is being provided by UNICEF-Malawi. The average size of transfer is $14 per month per beneficiary family.

Evaluation of the Malawi SCT Scheme

The evaluation of the Mchinji pilot of the SCT was conducted in 2007-08. Eight Village Development Groups were selected to enter the program of which 4 were immediately incorporated into the program and 4 were incorporated one year later. Baseline and follow-up information was collected on a sample of households from each of the two groups, with the ‘delayed entry’ group serving as the control group to assess program impacts. This design was both technically rigorous and ethically appropriate since the program could not be expanded to all TAs at once, determination of treatment and control groups were done randomly, and the control group was eventually incorporated into the program according to the normal program expansion cycle.

One baseline and two follow-up quantitative household surveys (at 6 and 12 months after intervention) were administered to the sample of approximately 800 households, and served as the key data source for the impact evaluation. The research design, which entailed collecting pre- and post-intervention indicators among a treatment and comparison group, allowed estimation of impacts using the ‘difference-in-differences’ (DD) method, the strongest research design possible in program evaluation. The SCTS is the first cash transfer program in Africa to be evaluated using this methodology. Implementation of the evaluation was done by Boston University’s School of Public health in collaboration with the Center for Social Research of the University of Malawi.