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| National |
| Civil society, MPs fine-tune social protection policy |
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by
Juliet Chimwaga , 05 December 2006
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11:01:58
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ActionAid International country director Chris Kinyanjui says there is no policy in Malawi that directly addresses poverty reduction, thereby putting the country in a difficult position to develop.
Kinyanjui said this in Lilongwe on Thursday when civil society groups and legislators met to debate on social protection policy and come up with strategies for poverty reduction.
He noted that Malawi has more than 50 percent of its population living below the poverty line.
“We realised that there are a lot of policies in the country among which there is none addressing actual poverty reduction in the country. But we believe that this policy being the one with direct effect on the people should be seriously looked into by the civil society and our legislators so that we can come up with something helpful for the starved country,” said Kinyanjui.
He said ActionAid decided to provide a platform for the civil society and the Members of Parliament to work out tangible ways of implementing the policy in a way that makes an impact on poverty in the country.
Kinyanjui said government is already working on the policy. He said it is also appropriate to involve the civil society to help in the policy’s formulation process.
“This policy is going to protect lives of Malawians. We have almost 50 percent of Malawians living below the poverty line, which is extremely bad but policies haven’t gone so much into poverty reduction. We feel enhancing this policy is one way of reducing poverty in the country,” said he.
Kinyanjui said Action Aid also decided to involve MPs right from the start so that they should be familiar with the policy as they are the people that make laws.
Organisations participating in the exercise were Plan International, the Malawi Human Rights Commission (MHRC), Concern World-wide, Oxfam and others.
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