Yamba Malawi

Elevate Prize funding and support would help my organization, Yamba Malawi, to work towards our ultimate goal of ending extreme childhood poverty in Malawi through promoting a child-focused model of ultra-poor poverty graduation. Specifically, the funds and other support provided by the Prize will be critical in helping Yamba Malawi achieve our scaling plan to reach 100,000 children by 2023. As we scale in the coming years, Yamba Malawi will increasingly engage with national, district, and local government agencies, other implementation partners, external research and evaluation partners, and with the international community of poverty graduation and social inclusion practitioners, to share our work and advocate for a child focus in these programs. Support from the Elevate Prize will greatly strengthen my ability to share the voices of Malawi’s children, and share the successes of Yamba Malawi’s work, with Malawian and international audiences. This will help us not only to meet the needs of Malawi’s most vulnerable children via our own work, but to push forward a global agenda for meeting children’s needs within the broader international community of economic inclusion programs.

I am a social justice and child rights advocate. The inspiration for my work comes from my own lived realities: from my childhood challenged by lack of basic necessities, and from my 27 years of working on behalf of socially and economically excluded children. As Co-Executive Director of Yamba Malawi, I lead an organization that partners with communities and caregivers in rural Malawi that are struggling to meet young children’s needs, and provide them with the resources, skills, and services they need to break the cycle of poverty while meeting young children’s needs. We focus on young children during the essential window between birth and age eight, when inadequate nutrition, healthcare, and cognitive stimulation can have lifelong impacts. I am passionate about using a Human-Centered Design approach to refining our work, and to promoting Indigenous-Based Knowledge about childcare practices within Malawi as Yamba Malawi scales our impact in the coming years.

Yamba Malawi serves ultra-poor children under age eight in Malawi, where 70% of the population lives in extreme poverty (less than $1.90/day). Globally, an estimated 356 million children live in extreme poverty. In Malawi, 60.5% of children are deprived of basic needs in more than one area: nutrition, health, education, housing, water, sanitation, and social protection. A staggering 37% of children are stunted by age five, and the most common causes of under-five mortality are malaria, pneumonia, and diarrhea, all preventable diseases exacerbated by poor housing, WASH, and nutrition, and weak access to healthcare. School feeding and early learning programs are essential responses, but only 40% of children receive these services. 

Our Childhoods & Livelihoods Program is based on three pillars: Childhood Wellbeing, Sustainable Business, and Financial Inclusion. It is a phased, three-year intervention at both household- and community-wide levels that empowers caregivers with knowledge, skills, and resources in Early Childhood Development (ECD), entrepreneurship, and financial literacy. Household caregivers launch their own micro-enterprises, learn planning and budgeting skills, and access financial services, including digital finance; community organizations strengthen their services, particularly early learning and school feeding programs, through launching profitable social enterprises and advocating for improved community infrastructure

Yamba Malawi’s approach is holistic—we target poverty as the root cause of children’s vulnerabilities, rather than implementing siloed, stand-alone interventions in nutrition, health, education, or other areas. While ultra-poor poverty graduation is well-established globally, less than half of programs measure impacts on children, despite children being twice as likely to as adults to live in extreme poverty. Yet focusing on the essential window of early years when childhood vulnerabilities can have lifelong effects is extremely cost effective. Our approach ensures rather than assumes that the benefits of poverty graduation programs benefit children. We also integrate Indigenous Knowledge in our programming. By including local approaches and traditional childcare practices, participants build self-confidence, which also improves overall sustainability. Our ECD curriculum is science-based, and also considers traditional childrearing contexts and recognizes traditional child-rearing practices, patterns and beliefs in the communities. Finally, our Human Centered Design Approach integrates community feedback and uses an innovative and flexible approach to program delivery. This helps our team continuously improve our model, while also building opportunities to adapt the program to meet the needs of special populations. By keeping children at the center of those innovations, we stay true to our mission while remaining flexible and responsive.

Since founding, Yamba Malawi has impacted the lives of 200,000 children. Our poverty graduation program has empowered seven Community-Based Organizations, 54 CBCCs, over 1,000 rural households, and thousands of caregivers. Most recent household data show that after one year in the program, children who eat three or more meals per day increased from 18% to 90%; children eating three or more food groups per day increased from 31% to 62%; children under ten years old regularly attending school increased 71%; and that households’ average annual incomes and the rates of households who held savings both more than tripled.

In 2021, we will launch the Childhoods & Livelihoods Program in a new district: Mangochi District in the Southern Region of Malawi. Mangochi’s extreme poverty rate is 81%, compared to the 70% national average, and 92% of children there are deprived of basic needs in at least one key area (nutrition, health, education, housing, water, sanitation, or social protection). We will focus on serving young mothers in Mangochi, where teen pregnancies have increased as a result of the pandemic and related school closures, because young mothers need particular support to build skills in childhood development, economic empowerment, financial literacy, and self confidence.