Analysis of Child-Sensitive Social Protection in Malawi (2020)

Millions of children in Malawi are highly vulnerable and deprived. About 60 percent of the country’s children are multi-dimensionally poor. Rates of children who are multi-dimensionally poor are higher in rural areas (70 percent) than in urban areas (25 percent). The high levels of deprivation span issues such as education, nutrition, housing, health, water, information, protection sanitation and hygiene. Child-sensitive social protection (CSSP) can help to tackle, at scale, a wide range of childhood deprivations among the most deprived and marginalised. Moreover, an effective social protection system is essential to the realisation of child rights, and an extensive body of positive evidence on the impacts of social protection on children is one of the reasons why governments and donors, including those in Malawi, have supported its expansion in recent decades.

The report develops and applies a child-sensitive methodology to help identify opportunities and challenges. The analysis shines a light on the implications of the social protection system for children and provides recommendations to make the sector more child-sensitive. It is deliberately concise and does not include contextual information; that knowledge is assumed by the reader. Section 2 outlines the methodology for the analysis, which is applied in Section 3 to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of the social protection sector with regard to child sensitivity, including recommendations. Section 4 provides brief concluding remarks.