In Numbers
75,075 cumulative and 12,334 active cases of COVID-19 in Malawi (31 December 2021)
USD 3.7 million six-month (January – June 2022) net funding requirements
11,000 refugee households assisted with cash distributions
Strategic Outcome 1
• Refugees: Double distributions for the months of November and December were completed, with cash and in-kind transfers of super cereal (corn-soya blend) for 11,000 refugee households (approximately 46,000 refugees) in Dzaleka refugee camp.
• Lean Season Response: To support the 2021/2022 lean season response, WFP is targeting over 16,000 households in the district of Chikwawa with cashbased transfers to meet their food gap. As of 31st December, about 12,000 households had received their entitlements (about USD 23 per household per month.)
Strategic Outcome 2
• School feeding: The Government of Norway announced a new contribution to support home grown school meals in three countries in Africa:
Ethiopia, Malawi and Niger. For Malawi, Norway has provided USD 1.5 million to support 50,000 children with school meals in 2022.
• Social protection: As part of the 2021/2022 lean season response, the Ministry of Gender, Children,
Disability and Social Welfare is supporting about 79,000 households receiving regular support from the Social Cash Transfer Programme with a cash top up to meet their food gap. WFP and UNICEF are supporting the Ministry in strengthening its systems such as the Unified Beneficiary Registry (UBR) which is used for beneficiary targeting.
Strategic Outcome 3
• Malnutrition prevention: Nutrition awareness campaigns on messages on maternal nutrition, infant and young child nutrition, water, hygiene and sanitation and COVID-19 reached over of 300,000 beneficiaries through door-to-door visits conducted by care group volunteers in Balaka, Chikwawa, Nsanje,
Phalombe and Zomba districts.
• WFP, in collaboration with the Department of Nutrition, HIV and AIDS hosted a Scaling Up Nutrition Business Network (SBN) breakfast meeting with private sector companies on 17th December 2021. Led by the Minister of Health, the breakfast aimed to enhance private sector contributions towards nutrition Contact info: Badre Bahaji (badre.bahaji@wfp.org) under the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) 3.0 strategy.
Strategic Outcome 4
• Livelihoods: In December, resilience building activities focused on (i) raising tree seedlings, (ii) land resource activities including building water conservation structures as well as (iii) irrigation activities where farmers concentrated on production of cash crops such as onions and tomatoes.
• In 2021, 32,000 farmers received cash-based transfers for asset creation while 72,000 farmers implemented asset creation while receiving only technical assistance from WFP.
• Ahead of the 2021/2022 growing season, farmers supported by WFP are registering for crop insurance to safeguard their produce against potential loss from weather shocks. So far, over 27,000 farmers have been registered in the targeted districts (Balaka, Blantyre, Chikwawa, Machinga, Mangochi, Nsanje, Phalombe and Zomba) and registration is still underway.
Strategic Outcome 5
• Malawi vulnerability assessment committee integrated food security phase classification (IPC) analysis: In December, the Malawi Government released the updated results of the IPC update assessments which indicate a slight uptick in the number of people classified as food insecure during the 2021/2022 lean season from 1.4 million to 1.6 million.
Strategic Outcome 6
• Emergency supply chain support to the COVID-19 response: Six fabricated container laboratories were transferred to Chitipa and Karonga Districts to support the Ministry of Health with screening incoming travellers at points of entry in line with the recently announced new prevention measures for COVID-19 in Malawi.
Source: World Food Programme