About the Study
Written by Scader Louis as part of the 2024 CIP Fellowship, the report draws on interviews with 33 SCTP beneficiaries with disabilities, key informant interviews with government and UNICEF officials, and discussions from a Disability Rights Fund convening attended by 16 Malawian organisations of persons with disabilities.
Ten dollars a month, funded almost entirely by outside donors: that’s the reality behind Malawi’s main safety net for its poorest citizens. This report on social protection for people with disabilities in Malawi, produced through the Center for Inclusive Policy (CIP) Fellowship, examines whether that program, the Social Cash Transfer Programme (SCTP), is actually reaching the people with disabilities it’s meant to help.
How Many People in Malawi Have a Disability?
Measured disability prevalence in Malawi rose from 3.8% in 2008 to 10.4% by 2018, about 1.5 million people, the majority women and living in rural areas. Vision and mobility difficulties are the most common, followed by intellectual disability.
Why Does the SCTP Struggle to Reach Them?
The program targets Malawi’s poorest 10% in each district using a registry that ranks households by poverty, not disability. That distinction matters more than it sounds: OPDs report that people with disabilities are routinely deprioritised in favor of community elites, and the eligibility criteria treat “unable to work” as just one qualifying condition among several, rather than accounting for disability specifically. One woman interviewed for the report was dropped from the program on the assumption she’d find work after graduating, over a year before the report was written, she still hadn’t.
Is the Cash Transfer Enough Even for Those Who Get It?
Barely. The average household benefit works out to about USD $10 a month, enough for a five-liter bucket of maize or two kilograms of dry beans. The amount doesn’t vary based on disability-related costs like assistive devices or caregiving, even though those costs can be substantial.
Who's Actually Paying for This Program?
Not the Malawian government, mostly. It contributes just 5% of the SCTP’s budget; the remaining 95% comes from the World Bank, Germany, the EU, and Irish Aid. That dependency creates real fragility: donor contributions swing year to year, and a pullback from any single funder, particularly the World Bank, which alone covered 46% of costs in 2023/24, could destabilise the whole program.
What About the Disability Trust Fund?
The study’s central recommendation is straightforward but significant: care systems need to recognise adults with disabilities as both recipients and providers of care, not just one or the other. That means designing services around independence and autonomy, not dependency, and building specific support for caregivers who themselves have disabilities, a group the current system doesn’t address at all.
What Does Malawi Need to Change?
The report’s recommendations center on one shift: moving from a poverty-first to a rights-based approach. That means increasing the government’s own financial stake in the SCTP, building a disability-specific registration system alongside the poverty-based one, and adjusting transfer values to reflect the real costs of living with a disability, the way Zambia’s cash transfer program already does for households with severe disabilities.
