Climate action blog: In Malawi, trusting communities to make decisions (and save money)

By Rebeka Ryvola, Climate Centre

(This is the second in a series of three blogs by the Climate Centre in the run-to the Climate Action Summit this Wednesday 16 September.)

Phalombe district, Malawi – In a village named Nambazo, a newly greened waterway is at work helping to control the annual floods the district faces. Before when the floods would come, the community would be inundated, crops would be damaged, livestock would be swept away, and the community would be cut off from surroundings.

Now, when floodwaters come, the greenway is able to stop the influx of water and the result is that members of the community, young and old, are able to continue to live their lives: go to schools outside of the village, make longer commutes, maintain connections with others in neighbouring villages, travel to the market to buy and sell fruits and vegetables, and so on.

This project is one of the first from the Red Cross Red Crescent’s Climate Action Journey towards locally led adaptation, an initiative that puts climate adaptation decision-making and implementation into the hands of communities.

Malawi Red Cross Enhanced Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment lead Leonard Maganga says that if external actors had decided on the project direction, as they so often did in the past, the project would have more likely focused on irrigation or livestock development. Here, the community was free to make their own decision, and they chose differently, focusing on access and connectivity.

Once their project was approved, they made a plan, hired an excavator from the neighbouring Zomba district, from a firm they could trust, and who would in turn also be willing to work closely with other community members on various decisions and project strategy. Incidentally, their project cost ended up being far below what it would have been if the project was externally run and managed.

But then the aid excavator’s owner found out about the Red Cross connection and tried to raise his rental price. The community had to advocate to keep the original costs. Leonard sees this as an example of how “locally led” is not a one-time project label, but something to be defined and redefined at all project stages.

He recounts how, during one of his later monitoring visits to the project site, some participants interpreted his presence as evidence that the Red Cross was trying to influence the project direction. When there are power imbalances at play, external supporters of LLA need to proceed with great care and an abundance of clarity.

LLA extends beyond the project being implemented, encompassing community leadership development and new relationship creation across and between all kinds of partners, with the community at the center.

The experience in Nambazo points to a broader lesson: LLA is not only about who makes decisions, but also about who controls the resources to act on them. And there is growing evidence that putting those resources directly in communities’ hands can deliver both better value and more durable results.

The World Bank’s Operations Evaluation Department has found that community-managed infrastructure costs 20–30% less than equivalent top-down construction, with savings reaching as much as 50 per cent in some contexts.

In Ralegan Siddhi, India, where villagers led their own watershed works, costs were lower, misuse was minimized, and maintenance was internalized, while per capita income rose eight-fold. The Partners for Resilience network, meanwhile, has leveraged over 8m euros through local plans across their partners.

And yet, the financing architecture has been much slower to change than the rhetoric. Of the 25 per cent target under the Grand Bargain for aid funding pledged to local actors, less than 5 per cent is reaching them.

Nambazo shows what can happen when a community is trusted not only to identify its priorities, but to make decisions, negotiate with suppliers, manage trade-offs, and spend resources itself. If LLA is to fulfill its promise, that trust ultimately has to extend to the money.

(Artwork by Rebeka Ryvola.)