Ideally Malawi has become a disaster-prone country. Nearly all districts are facing similar challenges due to climate change—delayed rains, dry spells and floods—are now part of the calendar.
Cyclone Chido has already left some communities in distress. Property was damaged and lives lost. There was panic and anxiety as to how much damage this new cyclone would cause.
The fear and panic is justifiable for wounds are still fresh from Cyclone Freddy, last year, which left deep scars of loss. The mention of cyclone brings about poignant recollection of Freddy’s cruelty.
“Imagine after planting maize we had to apply fertiliser hoping we would have the rains as usual but now the maize is wilting. I spent a lot on seed and fertiliser but all to nothing. We are in trouble,” lamented Godfrey Mussa, a farmer in Lilongwe rural under Traditional Authority Kalumba.
Mussa is among millions grieving over delayed rains. This, just like other climate change disasters, have led to low agricultural production leading to persistent hunger.
Year in, year out government is having to provide humanitarian support to almost 20 percent of the population that is persistently facing acute food shortage.
With these disasters poverty has become pervasive, meaning communities need more than food. They need mechanisms that will allow them cope with disasters or build resilience to still have a proper life even in the face of endless disasters.
Ideally, for government and other stakeholders to effectively support communities to build resilience there is need for credible data.
The Catholic Relief Service (CRS) and Cornell University, in collaboration with National Statistical Office (NSO) and University of Malawi, has developed a cost-effective data collection tool technically known as the Rapid Feedback Monitoring System (RFMS) to build communities’ resilience.
Unlike the traditional way of collecting data, the RFMS is a community-driven data collection tool.
It uses local enumerators who have been trained to capture information using a smartphone which has an inbuilt application that feeds into a centrally managed database.
In the targeted 13 districts CRS has recruited 300 enumerators who have been assigned an area or households under a traditional authority. The enumerators conduct interviews with these households every month asking a set of questions for years to have a complete picture of the life of these communities throughout the year.
“Actually, the targeted households are so eager to participate because they know that this is for their own benefit. We have built trust making it easy to ask all necessary questions to get as much information as we can,” explained Hopeson Chatala, an enumerator in Traditional Authority Lundu in Chikwawa.
The fact that these enumerators come from the same communities it is easy for them to capture correct information for being familiar with the area. The enumerators, for living in the same community, can capture information much faster than those outside the community.
“Think of a disaster such as flooding; we can take pictures using the smart phone but also engage communities instantly. This tool is helpful not only to communities but other stakeholders,” said Hasten Malenga, another enumerator in Nsanje.
The smartphones have codes to ascertian if the enumerator has visited a household or not at the designated time. This takes away cheating, and enhances the credibility of the data collected.
Besides working with community-based enumerators, the data collected on monthly basis is distributed to the village development committees, and they, in turn, share the data with other community members, as well as district-level personnel from the line ministries.
“Communities have used this information to identify priorities, develop community action plans and advocate to government and other actors for change in their communities,” reads the information on CRS website.
The fact that enumerators share information with members of the community, there is a high sense of ownership of this data; communities own the data and easily use the same because they believe in it.
Group village head Chipakuza believes the RFMS approach is effective because the findings are from the community and for the community.
“We have people who collect information from us and use it for their own purposes, but the RFMS is for us. We know what is going on in our area and use this information to make decisions,” he said.
The RFMS also provides a one-stop centre to other partners such as government agencies and non-governmental organisations to use this information in planning their interventions.
“RFMS also provides other information like food security, livelihoods coping mechanisms, and social assistance. It is difficult to monitor the immediate and medium-and long-term impacts of climate changes on poverty using the traditional methodology,” notes a 2022 World Bank report.
The RFMS directly supports Malawi’s National Resilience Strategy and Malawi 2063 as it aims to build community resilience and eradicate poverty. Effective it maybe, the downside is that it is implemented only in 13 districts.
CRS is aware of this gap and is slowly expanding to other areas as in March 2022 it included Blantyre, Zomba and Mangochi urban centres “with an aim of understanding the dynamics of resilience, vulnerability and poverty in the peri-urban”.
According to information available on CRS website the goal is to expand the RFMS nationwide “and become a Malawi-owned process to support transformative country-wide resilience”.
