Ministry of Gender, Children, Disability and Social Welfare says the Social Cash Transfer Programme (SCTP) will be scaled up to 10 new districts targeting over 319,000 households by end of December, 2017 from the current 176,505 households.
Principal Secretary (PS) for the Ministry, Dr. Esmie Kainja made the revelation on Wednesday through an email response to the Malawi News Agency (MANA) .
“The Social Cash transfer Program, commonly branded as ‘Mtukula Pakhomo’, is now covering 176,505 households translating into 783,832 individuals; the current increase is mainly as a result of enrolment of new households in Thyolo into the program.
“However, the scaling up of the programme in 10 new districts will see the program expanding coverage to over 319,000 households by, at least, end of December, 2017,” said Kainja.
She said the addition of the 10 districts means that SCTP is now being implemented in all the 28 districts of Malawi and so far, there is progress in the registration of poor households in the new districts.
“Blantyre is one of the 10 districts currently going through the scaling up of the Social Cash Transfer Programme. The district has just completed registration of at least 50 percent of poor households using Unified Beneficiary Registration (UBR) system,” said the PS.
The other districts that have also been added to the program are Karonga, Rumphi, Nkhotakota, Kasungu, Dowa, Ntchisi, Lilongwe, Ntcheu and Chiradzulu.
“In all the 10 new districts, progress in respect of registration of poor households is at 62 percent of attainment and Blantyre, Rumphi, Chiradzulu, Karonga, Nkhotakota and Ntchisi are complete with registration of poor households at 50 percent and are ready to commence enrolment of beneficiaries into the Social Cash Transfer Program,” explained the PS.
So far, the SCTP has been able to register a multiplier effect of 1.69 implying that beneficiaries have been able to translate each Kwacha received into an additional K0.69 of spending.
According to Kainja, the multiplier effect is largely attributed to the community’s ownership of agricultural tools and use of farm inputs.