Winter Chinamale

Community Procurement for Effective Local Infrastructure Development: the Case of Malawi Social Action Fund Winter Chinamale

Local Development in Malawi has been decentralised and rural communities are provided with funds to manage their own development initiatives. Since 1995, MASAF has taken the lead in Malawi in providing resources to communities to implement local development activities using Community Driven Development (CDD) approaches. In implementing these activities, procurement of goods, labour and other services plays a critical role and accounts for over seventy percent of the project budget. The study was aimed at finding out how effective community procurement is, in the context of MASAF community managed projects. Through the study, community procurement has been studied to assess its effectiveness with a view to drawing out lessons for future Community Procurement frameworks. The study has revealed that local communities need to be more involved in processes of the design and budgeting for the required services. Communities have demonstrated capacity to implement local development projects of acceptable quality. There is, however, need for improvement of the procurement processes to enhance economy, efficiency, fairness and transparency.