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Documented examples

Each record describes something a country built that the indicators do not capture. The source provides the published number; the mechanism is our interpretation.

Scores describe outcomes. These records describe how a country acted, what it needed and what happened. 742 of 742 records include a mechanism. They do not affect scores.

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5 of 742 deliveries

Anticipation

1 delivery linked to Government foresight capacity.

Malawisince 2020still operatingbears on Government foresight capacity

National Planning Commission foresight work for Malawi 2063

Malawi's National Planning Commission, which signed a UNDP initiation plan in November 2020 to create a foresight unit and horizon scanning capability, reported for 2022/23 that it produced a foresight modelling report with modelled scenarios for the Malawi 2063 vision, policy briefs on three of the vision's pillars with UNDP and the finance ministry, and foresight modelling training for planners from ministries and academia.

1 reports, foresight modelling reports produced (assessing malawi's trajectory towards mip-1 milestones and mw2063 aspirations), FY2022/23. National Planning Commission of Malawi, 2023 Annual Report (financial year 2022/2023), section 3.3.3 Enhanced Foresight Initiatives, retrieved 2026-10-02.

The move, and what it needed

The statutory planning commission that owns the national long-term vision built a small foresight and modelling capability with UNDP support and used it to test the vision's targets against scenarios and to train planners in ministries.

Preconditions

  • A statutory planning commission with a mandate over a long-term vision
  • Donor funding and technical partners to seed the capability
  • Ministry planners and academics willing to adopt the methods

Where else it has been used: The commission organised a learning visit on foresight planning to South Africa in the same year, so the method was borrowed from a regional neighbour as well as from UNDP.

Limits: The commission reports on itself, in a PDF (section 3.3, printed pages 38 to 39, PDF page 42). The metric is a single report, and the text does not say how many policy briefs were written, only that they covered the urbanisation, industrialisation and agricultural productivity pillars, so the delivery figure is thin. The foresight work leans on UNDP: the unit was set up under a six-month UNDP initiation plan (NPC news item, 26 November 2020, https://npc.mw/2020/12/npc-undp-sign-agreement-to-initiate-implementation-of-foresight-project/) and the 2022/23 briefs were produced with UNDP, so the record cannot separate national capacity from donor support. The commission is primarily a development planning body that monitors the Malawi 2063 vision and its first ten-year implementation plan, which sits closer to planning than to open-ended scenario foresight; its modelled scenarios are tied to vision targets. No later annual report was read, so status rests on 2022/23, and the report gives no staff count or budget for the foresight function.

Learning

1 delivery linked to Adult learning participation.

Malawisince 1986still operatingbears on Adult learning participation

National Adult Literacy Programme

Malawi's Ministry of Gender, Community Development and Social Welfare has run the National Adult Literacy Programme since 1986 through volunteer-taught community classes. Enrolment in Adult Literacy and Education reached 171,434 learners in the 2024/25 financial year, against about 82,000 participants in 2006.

171,434 learners, learners enrolled in adult literacy and education, 2024/25 financial year. 82,312 learners, adult literacy participants, public and ngo classes combined, 2006. Malawi Government, Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs, Annual Economic Report 2025 (Budget Document No. 2), section 15.2.2.1, retrieved 2026-10-02.

The move, and what it needed

The ministry responsible for community development runs adult literacy as a standing national programme. It organises classes of about 25 learners through district community development officers and volunteer instructors that communities choose, and NGOs and churches run parallel classes under the same policy.

Preconditions

  • A field network of district community development staff to open and supervise classes in every district
  • Volunteers with at least primary schooling willing to teach for little or no pay
  • A recurrent budget line, however small, that survives changes of ministry

Limits: The gap asks for a share of adults, and this is a count of learners in one literacy programme. Against Malawi's adult population, roughly 10 million people aged 15 and over, it is under 2 percent. That ratio is our rough computation and is not published. The figure is the ministry's administrative report, carried without method in a budget document. It does not say whether NGO and faith-based classes are included. The series is inconsistent: the Annual Economic Report 2024 gives the same 158,048 as learners who 'graduated' in 2023/24, and the 2025 report uses it as the previous year's enrolment. The 2006 comparison comes from a different ministry, the department's earlier home, and counts public and NGO participants together, so the two numbers may not measure the same thing. Literacy classes are one narrow kind of non-formal adult education. They say nothing about vocational, workplace or tertiary adult learning. The 2008 report records that the programme aimed to reach 2 million of 4.6 million illiterate adults by 2000 but had reached about 860,000 by 2006. It also records 'magnitude of failure', volunteer instructors whose minimum qualification is primary school grade 8, and inadequate funding. The 2025 report names the National Strategy on Adult Literacy and Lifelong Learning, not NALP, so treating the 2024/25 enrolment as the same programme begun in 1986 is our reading. Enrolment says nothing about completion or literacy gained.

Adaptability

2 deliveries linked to Disaster preparedness and recovery, Institutional responsiveness.

Malawisince 2019still operatingbears on Disaster preparedness and recovery

Shock-responsive social cash transfers and the Cat DDO

From 2019 the Government of Malawi identified every household it registered for shock-responsive cash transfers through its Unified Beneficiary Registry. It expanded the Social Cash Transfer Programme to give drought and COVID-19 aid to more than 300,000 rural households, and it drew US$30 million of pre-arranged contingent financing on 10 April 2020, three weeks after declaring a state of disaster.

300,000 households (more than), rural households given drought and covid-19 aid through shock-responsive expansions of the social cash transfer programme, identified through the unified beneficiary registry, 2019 to 2023. 30 million USD, catastrophe deferred drawdown option disbursed after the covid-19 state of disaster, 10 April 2020. World Bank, Implementation Completion and Results Report ICR00006189, Malawi Disaster Risk Management Development Policy Financing with Cat DDO (P165056), June 2023, retrieved 2026-10-02.

The move, and what it needed

Malawi's Ministry of Finance and its social protection agencies built one registry of rural households and set protocols that every shock-response transfer must use it. They paired the registry with financing pre-arranged before a disaster (a contingent credit line, a project contingency window and sovereign drought insurance), so cash could reach households without a new appeal each time.

Preconditions

  • A census-style household registry covering most of the rural population and kept current
  • Contingent financing agreed before the shock, which here depended on concessional lenders and an insurance pool
  • A legal trigger, a declared state of disaster under the 1991 Disaster Preparedness and Relief Act, that releases the funds

Limits: The source is the lender's self-evaluation of its own policy operation, and the 300,000 is a floor ('more than') summed over about four years and two kinds of shock. It is not a per-event count and has no denominator of affected households. The money behind the transfers was largely external: a World Bank project's contingency window, ARC sovereign drought insurance whose premiums donors financed in full (ICR Annex), and IDA's Cat DDO. The evidence is that the national system routed aid, not that Malawi financed it. The Cat DDO was triggered by a pandemic, not a natural hazard, and its US$30 million was budget support with no traceable link to households. The ICR says fewer than 10 percent of the households receiving transfers were registered before the protocols. It rates the operation moderately satisfactory and reports that resilient transport standards were never developed. The source is dated June 2023; the operation itself closed in 2022. Cyclone Freddy (February and March 2023) and the 2024 El Nino drought fell after the operation closed and are not assessed. 'Operating' assumes the registry and the scale-up mechanism are still in use, which this source does not confirm beyond 2023.

Malawisince 2020delivered and closedbears on Institutional responsiveness

COVID-19 Urban Cash Intervention, and its slow payment

Malawi declared a State of Disaster over COVID-19 on 20 March 2020 and enrolled 194,762 eligible urban households in a three-month cash transfer in four cities, but first payments came only after January 2021, and by 30 June 2021 just 32,000 households, 16 percent, had received all three payments while 29 percent had received none.

16.4 %, eligible households that had received all three cuci payments by 30 june 2021, 2021-06-30. 194,762 households, eligible households enrolled, 2021-06-30. World Bank, Malawi COVID-19 Urban Cash Intervention Process Evaluation Report (2021), retrieved 2026-10-02.

The move, and what it needed

The social welfare ministry designed a new urban transfer from scratch, registering households door to door in hotspots and paying by mobile money, with no prior urban registry to draw on.

Preconditions

  • An urban beneficiary registry, which Malawi did not have, so registration took most of 2020
  • Mobile money accounts already verified in the recipients' names
  • Agent networks with enough cash for a sudden mass withdrawal

Where else it has been used: Madagascar's Tosika Fameno (mdg-tosika-fameno) paid in four weeks through an agency that already ran transfers; the contrast is the evaluation's own lesson about building delivery systems before the shock.

Limits: The figures are in a PDF (State of Disaster date on PDF page 19, printed page 18; Table 8 and the January 2021 payment plan on PDF page 41). The World Bank co-financed the intervention with KfW, the EU and others, and commissioned the evaluation, but its own report documents the delay rather than hiding it. The record is evidence of slow responsiveness: about ten months from the State of Disaster to the first planned payment, a span we computed from the report's dates, and 15 months later only one in six households was fully paid. The report attributes the lag to know-your-customer failures between registration data and mobile network operator records and to agent liquidity, not to political choice. The 199,000 households cited elsewhere in the report is the enrolment target; the 194,762 is the eligible count in Table 8. Payments continued after June 2021 and the final completion figure is not in this report.

Building

1 delivery linked to Large project delivery.

Malawisince 2012still operatingbears on Large project delivery

Energy Sector Support Project (substations and distribution lines)

Malawi's electricity utility ESCOM completed and energised all 10 substations and seven of nine planned distribution lines under the Energy Sector Support Project approved in 2011, closing on 15 October 2018 against an original closing date of 30 October 2016, having disbursed US$72.1 million of US$84.7 million.

10 substations, substations completed, energised and loaded, 2018-10. 7 lines, distribution lines completed out of nine planned, 2018-10. World Bank, Implementation Completion and Results Report, Malawi Energy Sector Support Project (P099626), 2019, retrieved 2026-10-02.

The move, and what it needed

Malawi's state utility reinforced the grid in its load centres with a package of substations and lines on concessional credit, and finished the works itself after its supervising consultant ran out of budget.

Preconditions

  • A utility with in-house engineers able to finish works without a consultant
  • Concessional finance with room to extend closing dates
  • Demand growth that kept the works a priority

Limits: The World Bank's completion report, which rated the outcome Satisfactory, is the source; the substation and line counts are in paras. 103 and around 583 of the text file and the dates and amounts in the data sheet. The report gives no appraisal cost per work package, so cost performance cannot be read beyond the undisbursed balance, which reflects delay and cancellation rather than savings. The two-year extension followed procurement delays the report attributes to the political situation and inexperience with Bank procedures, and the implementation consultant stopped work in December 2017 when its budget ran out, leaving ESCOM to finish alone. At US$85 million this is a modest programme of grid reinforcement, not a single major build, so it is weak evidence on major project delivery. Plain-text file, no PDF page numbers.