Vice President Dr Saulos Chilima gave the reaffirmation when he presided over Rural Resilience Initiative Insurance Pay-out a program championed by World Food Program (WFP) at Chaweta primary school ground in Blantyre. The Vice President said Malawi continues to be vulnerable to the effects of climate change which have been increasing in recent times as evidenced by rainfall variability, droughts and floods.
This, in turn according to the Vice President has continued to negatively affect smallholder farmers who live in rural areas with no means to modern farming technologies like irrigation in times of drought.
“The trend has increased the farmers’ vulnerability to weather shocks such as the dry spells experienced in the just-ended growing season. Disasters in Malawi have three main impacts: food insecurity, stagnant development and stressed population.
While government and its partners provide relief food to affected populations during emergencies, this intervention has failed to break the cycle of food insecurity because they did not build resilience,” said Chilima.
He further said that it is for this reason that the four pillars of the Government’s National Resilience Strategy (NRS) emphasize resilient agricultural growth; risk reduction, flood control and early warning and response systems; human capacity, livelihoods and social protection; and catchment protection and management.
The NRS aims at achieving two key outcomes namely: to have the cycle of disasters, especially food insecurity broken and to build national resilience to disasters. However, building resilience of a community requires large scale investments of money, human resources, and time.
“It is for this reason that as a government we recognize the big role that WFP and its partners, namely World Vision, United Purpose, FISD, and CUMO, are doing in implementing resilience building programmes using an integrated approach,” added the Vice President.
These methods include Food assistance for asset creation (FFA); Weather-indexed micro insurance (Risk transfer), micro credit (Prudent risk taking), savings (Risk reserve) and climate services through which 7, 000 families that were enrolled in the insurance component this year are getting a pay-out amounting to 500,000 US Dollars which is about 360 million Kwacha.
For his part, Benoit Thiry who is a country director for World Food Program (WFP) said the aim of the insurance payout is to eradicate hunger among farmers.
He added that the initiative is good to manage climate risk by enabling the poorest farmers to pay for drought insurance with their labour while developing their capacity to pay for it with cash.
“The insurance is the risk transfer component of R4 and is a weather index microinsurance product, which protects farmers’ investment in agriculture against drought,” he said.
About 254 farmers of Chiweta Group insured their productive assets during the 2017/2018 season, during which the district of Blantyre experienced dry spells. Each of the 254 beneficiaries in this group have received a pay-out of MK38,000.
On this, the Vice President advised insurance beneficiaries to make good use of the money by investing it into agriculture to further improve income and food security at household level or the loan schemes.
The program by World Food Program is in line with Professor Arthur Peter Mutharika’s words that no one in the country despite droughts or any natural disaster will die of hunger.
