Poor households in Malawi have had to adjust to an array of negative shocks to their livelihoods over the past decade. But what coping strategies do poor people adopt in times of crisis? How successful are they?
An Institute of Development Studies report examines the role of ‘informal safety nets’, or coping strategies adopted in times of acute food insecurity, in providing protection against livelihood shocks in Malawi. Should policymakers consider ‘productivity-enhancing safety nets’, to help boost agricultural production, rather than programmes that merely compensate for production deficits?
Poor households in sub-Saharan Africa are adjusting to a bewildering array of radical policy changes within which they struggle to construct viable livelihoods. These include, in Malawi, the removal of fertiliser subsidies and massive currency devaluations that contribute to increasing food production deficits at household and national levels, as well as to rapidly rising prices for food, agricultural inputs and consumer goods.
How do poor households adapt? They search for additional cash or food (through informal employment, borrowing, or gifts from relatives and friends) or adopt austerity measures such as rationing food consumption or withdrawing children from school, with negative implications for both immediate and future wellbeing.
Aiming to enhance understanding of the nature, extent, and effectiveness of informal safety nets in Malawi, the report examines their role in providing protection against livelihood shocks, through a review of the literature and a survey of rural and urban communities in the south in early 1999.
Key research findings include:
- In rural areas livelihood shocks include regular droughts and floods, reductions in size of landholdings caused by population pressure, and constrained access to agricultural inputs.
- In urban areas economic shocks are related mainly to rapidly rising costs of living, which cause the prices of most basic commodities to increase and undermine the profitability of informal sector enterprises.
- In comparison with urban respondents those in rural areas had fewer income-generating opportunities to draw on, and more rural households were refused assistance from relatives and friends.
- Informal transfers, either between rich and poor or among the poor themselves, appear to be declining over time, partly as a general consequence of commercialisation and partly because deepening poverty means that the economic basis for redistribution is contracting.
- Since informal transfers are increasingly confined to extended family networks and neighbours within poor communities, any presumption that formal safety net interventions will simply displace well-functioning informal safety nets and create dependency on external assistance is unfounded.
Policy implications:
- Assessments of public works projects found that such interventions do not compete with farming if they are carefully designed and timed - they can be effective safety nets, and are self-targeting.
- However, public works projects raise unresolved gender concerns; for example, men tend to monopolise cash-for-work projects while women are channelled into lower status food-for-work activities.
- Policymakers should consider ‘productivity-enhancing safety nets’, which boost agricultural production, rather than programmes that merely compensate for food production deficits.
- Greater recognition is required of the need for development of all forms of capital (including human and social) in poor communities.
Source(s):
‘Making Less Last Longer’ IDS Discussion Paper #373, Institute of
Development Studies, Brighton by Stephen Devereux (1999)
Funded by:
DFID and UNDP
id21 Research Highlight: 9 March 2001
Further Information:
Stephen Devereux
Institute of Development Studies
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9RJ
UK
Tel:
+44 (0)1273 606 261
Fax:
+44 (0)1273 621 202/691 647
Contact the contributor: S.Devereux@ids.ac.uk
Institute of Development Studies (IDS), UK
Other related links:
See ID21's summary of 'Can social safety nets contribute to poverty
reduction in Africa?' also by Stephen Devereux
Refer to the Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion for further
research on poverty
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The Poverty Research Unit aims to develop existing and new areas of
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