Malawi - Integrated Social Protection for Resilience and Opportunity Project

Overview & Synopsis

Integrated Social Protection for Resilience and Opportunity Project for Malawi has development objectives to increase the resilience to climate and economic shocks and expand job opportunities for poor and vulnerable groups. Component 1: Adaptive Safety Nets strengthens household consumption and shock response through two Sub-components. Sub-component 1.1: Social Cash Transfer Program (SCTP) provides regular, unconditional cash transfers to the poorest and most labor-constrained households, using the Malawi Social Registry (MSR) and a unified management information system to ensure predictable, digitally delivered payments and improved case management. Sub-component 1.2: Adaptive Shock Response Financing establishes a pre-arranged, rules-based scalability mechanism within a disaster risk financing framework to channel timely additional transfers during drought and other climate shocks through vertical and horizontal expansion, supported by dynamic social registry updates and harmonized digital payments. Component 2: Creating Job Opportunities – Jobs NOW for the Poor and Vulnerable expands income-earning pathways through three sequenced Sub-components. Sub-component 2.1: Climate-Smart Labor-Intensive Public Works (CS-LIPW) offers short-term employment linked to climate-resilient asset creation in priority micro-catchments that protect roads, irrigation, and hydropower, while fostering savings for progression to livelihoods support. Sub-component 2.2: Ultra-poor Graduation layers an integrated economic inclusion package on top of SCTP for selected households, combining productive asset support, savings promotion, skills and mindset training, nutrition-sensitive measures, coaching, and linkages to public and private services over 18 to 36 months to build self-reliance and climate-resilient livelihoods. Sub-component 2.3: Micro-entrepreneurship Program supports rural and urban micro-enterprises, prioritizing women and youth, through business development services, coaching, financial and market linkages, and performance-based productive grants delivered via e-payments, with rural individual grants for CS-LIPW participants and an urban youth pilot organized in enterprise groups and using a cost-sharing model to catalyze growth and job creation in sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, tourism, and energy. Component 3: Institutional Strengthening, Digital Delivery Systems, and Project Management enhances system efficiency and sustainability through three Sub-components. Sub-component 3.1: Institutional Strengthening and Coordination builds capacity in the Ministry of Finance, Economic Planning, and Decentralization and the Ministry of Labor, Skills, and Innovation to coordinate social protection and active labor market programs, develop a national jobs portal and labor market information system, and guide policy reforms. Sub-component 3.2: Dynamic Delivery Systems scales a dynamic MSR with on-demand registration and interoperability with national identification and other government platforms; expands harmonized government-to-person digital payments through the national payments gateway; and operationalizes an integrated Core Management Information System (COREMIS) that unifies targeting, enrollment, payments, case management, grievance redress, and monitoring across programs. Sub-component 3.3: Project Management establishes a dedicated Project Implementation Unit within the National Local Government Finance Committee to coordinate implementation, fiduciary compliance, monitoring and evaluation, safeguards, communications, and adaptive learning across all components and implementing partners.