Malawi’s budgets not child-friendly, says CfSC

An analysis by the Centre for Social Concern (CfSC) has shown that Malawi’s national budgets for the past four years have not been child-friendly.

CfSC says while the absolute figure of the budget has been increasing, the budgetary allocation to the Ministry of Child Development and Social Welfare in the last four fiscal years has been dwindling.

The social welfare monitoring body has since introduced what it calls ‘child friendly budgeting project’ aimed at contributing towards realising child rights through the national budget.

The child-friendly project concept of budgeting that CfSC would like to advocate for, is a new concept in the country and would first be implemented in Mzuzu, Mangochi and Zomba before it is scaled up to other districts, according to CfSC.

However, the concept is not new in other Southern Africa Development Community (Sadc) countries where it has been implemented under the Sadc Child Budgeting advocacy – spearheaded by the Institute for Democracy in Southern Africa (Idasa) regional programme.

Countries such as Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Botswana under Idasa have used the tool to campaign for child friendly budgets.

CfSC social conditions research programmes officer Alex Nkosi, in an interview in Lilongwe, said that of the total K304 billion resource envelop in the 2011/12 national budget, only K557.61 million was allocated to children representing 0.18 percent of the total budget.

The same applies to the 2010/11 and 2009/10 national budgets where government only allocated K716 million and K618 million, respectively, to the Ministry of Child Development and Social Welfare.

The 2011/12 budget statement, presented by former Finance Minister Ken Kandodo indicated that although the Malawi economy was growing fast, but the economic growth did not translate into the creation of decent jobs for young people.

“It is important to prepare our youth for non-formal employment through expansion of vocational education and training centres. In addition, we need to provide access to finance for those that might want to be self-employed,” said Kandodo, in the statement.

He said government recognises that more needs to be done if Malawi is to gainfully employ the youth and build a better Malawi where those looking for jobs find them.

But Nkosi said while the resource allocation to the key ministry is on the decline, the number of children in need of more care is on the increase, citing 2010 alone when there were close to 1.5 million orphaned children and youth in the country.

He said the absence of child budgeting campaign, weak or lack of involvement of children in the budgeting process and untimely involvement in the budgeting process, are the key factors behind the decline in the allocation.

“Child Friendly Budgeting is about influencing the planning, allocation and utilisation of resources with the objective to realise child rights,” said Nkosi.

He said the CfSC ideology is founded on the provisions of Article four of the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of the Children (UNCRC) that realises that appropriate legislative, administrative and other support mechanisms are necessary conditions for the implementation and realisation of child rights.

Nkosi said the project’s goal is to contribute towards a comprehensive, inclusive child responsive budgeting process in Malawi that allocates resources to child activities to realise child rights using the existing policy and legal framework.

“We want the national budget to progressively become more responsive to meet children’s needs and activities and also we want a strengthened support structures and sustained child friendly budgeting process in Malawi,” he said.

Currently, there are more children who are on the streets who lack basic food items, health services and education which according to CfSC, is a serious problem because it means government coughing huge sums in the subsequent budgets just to contain rising crime and spending more on police and prisons.

Available statistics indicate that 12.4 percent of children in Malawi are orphaned, 77.3 percent being single orphaned (lost one parent) while 22.4 percent are double orphaned having lost both parents.

 By 2011, there were an estimated, one million orphans in the country under the age of 18; 52.7 percent of are in Southern region of Malawi, while 34.3 percent are in the central region and 13 percent are in the north.

According to CfSC, children and women make up the biggest proportion of Malawi’s population.