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

By Leonard Maganga, Malawi Red Cross Head of Enhanced Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment, as told to the Climate Centre

Phalombe district, Malawi – In Nambazo village, a new greenway* is at work helping to control the annual floods the district faces. Before when the floods came, the community would be inundated, crops would be damaged, livestock would be swept away, and the community would be cut off.

Now the greenway is able to stop the water and members of the community, young and old, are able to continue to live their lives: go to school outside of the village, make longer commutes, maintain connections with neighbouring villages, travel to the market to buy and sell fruit 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 that puts decision-making on and implementation of adaptation into the hands of communities.

If external actors had decided on the direction of the Nambazo project, as they so often did in the past, it would have more likely focused on irrigation or livestock development. But the community was free to make their own decisions and they chose instead to focus on access and connectivity.

Better value, durable results

Once their project was approved, they made a plan, hired an excavator from the neighbouring Zomba district from a firm they could trust who would work closely with other community members; the cost ended up being far below what it would have been otherwise.

This as an example of how “locally led” is not a one-time project label but something to be defined and redefined at all stages. During a monitoring visit to the project site, for example, some participants thought 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 clarity. LLA extends beyond the project being implemented, encompassing community leadership and new relationships between partners, with the community at the centre.

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 better value and more durable results. 

Trust

The World Bank has found that community-managed infrastructure costs up to 30 per cent less than equivalent top-down construction, with savings or as much as 50 per cent in some contexts.

In the village Ralegan-Siddhi in the Indian state of Maharashtra, for example, 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, leveraged over €8 million 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 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.

*A strip of undeveloped land near an urban area, set aside for recreational use or environmental protection.

(Artwork by Rebeka Ryvola.)