Karonga District defends Climate Smart Enhanced Public Works payment issues amid allegations
Karonga District Council, in collaboration with the National Local Government Finance Committee (NLGFC), has strongly defended its handling of payments under the Climate Smart Enhanced Public Works (CSEPW) project. Officials have clarified that payment delays experienced during the program’s initial rollout have been resolved, dismissing allegations of unpaid participants.
The CSEPW project, funded by a $128 million World Bank grant, was launched to empower vulnerable communities by restoring degraded environments, building climate-resilient assets, and providing income to ultra-poor households. Participants engage in activities such as planting trees, constructing check dams, and digging ditches to reduce soil erosion and mitigate flood risks.
Through the project, which rolled out to all 28 districts of Malawi following the 2021/22 pilot in 10 districts, councils are recruiting individuals from poor communities, particularly those prone to effects of climate change such as droughts and floods.
The participants are invited to join community efforts to strengthen climate resilience for which they are offered MK28,800 (now revised to MK48, 000 per cycle). Each cycle is 30 days.
Among others, participants plant trees along riverbanks, build check dams to reduce soil erosion, and dig channels and ditches to reduce flood risks.
As many as 16, 000 vulnerable persons have benefited from the project in Karonga, which initially rolled out as a pilot project in 2022.
But Karonga District Commissioner (DC), Frank Mkandawire, told Nyasa Times on Wednesday that the initial implementation of the project suffered setbacks, leading to some participants having challenges to access their payments.
According to Mkandawire, majority of the participants did not have national identity cards and mobile phones that would facilitate transfer of the payment at the end of each cycle.
He said this created a big challenge to effect payment.
“I must state at the outset and there has been no time since the project started that participants were not paid. But being a strictly e-payment programme, the participants are asked to produce national IDs and phone numbers through which payment could be transferred, things which we realized later that most of them did not have despite assuring the recruitment personnel that they had,” he explained.
Mkandawire disclosed that after noting this problem, the council and GRM committees instructed TNM Plc to pay the ‘stranded’ participants through their proxies – who could be relatives or sons of participants with IDs and phones.
“And that is how we resolved the problem,” Mkandawire said while dismissing assertions that his officials deliberately delay payment processes.
He said the council does not handle money as its role is simply to coordinate: that is to say after the expiry of each cycle, officials from the council go to the catchment areas to collect log sheets, which enable them to prepare a wage sheet, which is submitted to NLGFC for authorization of payment.
When the wage sheet is prepared, it is submitted to TNM Plc which then transfers the payments through the participants’ phone numbers or their proxies.
But Tawonga Mgala, Designated Desk Officer for Lupembe Extension Planning Area (EPA), indicated that 78 participants have not received their payment from the third cycle because the foreman failed to submit the log sheet on time.
“At the time other foremen were submitting the sheets, the foreman for Lupembe EPA had gone on a journey no one knew. He returned a week later and we went to collect it,” said Mgala.
But he was quick to disclose that his office had already done paperwork to facilitate the payment.
When we interviewed community leaders in Lupembe, Hara and Pusi, it was evident that participants who had initially been skipped the payment were sorted out through either proxies or after acquiring a national ID and a TNM mobile number.
Both officials from NLGFC and the World Bank expressed satisfaction with the progress Karonga District Council had made in resolving the payment glitches.
In February 2024, the Minister of Finance, Simplex Banda, disclosed that the CSEPW project had enrolled 520,000 participants countrywide.
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