When the City plans, do the informal settlements listen? A policy review of the Lilongwe City Resilience Action Framework (RAF) through the lens of locally-managed finance for urban ecosystem restoration
Introduction
Urban areas in Malawi comprise the four major cities of Blantyre, Lilongwe, Mzuzu and Zomba, as well as other towns and gazetted planning areas. According to the National Statistics Office (NSO) 2018 Malawi Population and Housing Census, approximately 18% of Malawi’s population resides in urban areas, a steady rise from 6.4% at independence in 1964. Malawi remains moderately urbanised relative to many countries in the region, yet its urban growth rate of 5.2% per annum is nearly double the national population growth rate of 2.8% per annum. Statistical projections suggest that 30% of the population will be urban-based by 2030 and 50% by 2050 (NSO, 2018). The major drivers of urbanization are an increase in high disasters, rural-urban migration and immigration (UN Habitat 2023).
However, the speed and scale of urban expansion have generated substantial structural challenges including inadequate and unaffordable housing, rising urban poverty, limited access to potable water and improved sanitation, unsustainable solid waste systems, proliferation of informal settlements and uncontrolled sprawl. These dynamics are most visible in the informal settlements, where low-income households frequently occupy marginal lands for example hill slopes, wetlands and flood-prone areas, due to dysfunctional land markets and weak urban planning systems (Manda, 2015; National Urban Policy, 2019).
Informal settlement residents are disproportionately exposed to the effects of climate variability and extreme weather events. Recurrent flooding, driven by increasingly erratic and intense rainfall patterns, regularly destroys homes, displaces families and contaminates water sources, triggering outbreaks of waterborne diseases such as cholera and typhoid. Settlements like Ching’ambo and Salisbury Lines in Mzuzu built along riverbanks and in low-lying drainage corridors face seasonal inundation that strips households of assets, disrupts livelihoods and forces repeated cycles of displacement and resettlement with little to no formal support.
The Resilience Action Framework (RAF): context and significance
Lilongwe City Council (LCC) developed the Resilience Action Framework (RAF) in 2020, with technical assistance from UN-Habitat and the Technical Centre for Disaster Risk Management, Sustainability and Urban Resilience (DiMSUR). According to LCC, the Framework was designed to enable local decision makers, planners and communities to jointly plan and take coordinated action toward building the long-term resilience of the city. Its development reflects a growing recognition by the city authorities that managing urban risk requires not only institutional capacity, but meaningful collaboration between government and the communities most exposed to hazard. The Lilongwe City Council (2020) noted that, together with relevant stakeholders, it needs to work closely with communities in the area to implement effective resilience-building interventions. This collaboration is essential to maintain continuity while enabling the area to positively adapt and transform towards long-term sustainability.
The need for such a framework is firmly grounded in Lilongwe’s disaster history. Over the years, the city has experienced recurring disasters, particularly within its informal settlements, with floods, windstorms, rainstorms and waterborne diseases being the most prevalent (Msasa and Manda 2025). These vulnerabilities are formally acknowledged in the Lilongwe City Council Disaster Risk Management Plan of 2017, underscoring that urban risk in Lilongwe is not a new challenge, but one that has persisted without sufficiently structured response mechanisms at the local level.
The RAF draws on the UN-Habitat definition of urban resilience, which refers to the ability of any urban system, together with its inhabitants, to maintain continuity through all shocks and stresses while positively adapting and transforming toward sustainability (UN Habitat 2020). This definition is significant because it positions resilience not as a technical outcome alone, but as a socially inclusive process in which informal settlement residents are active participants rather than passive beneficiaries of planning decisions.
Central to the RAF’s methodology is the City Resilience Action Planning tool, commonly known as CityRAP. This is a structured, step-by-step process comprising a series of training workshops, participatory exercises and field activities that guide communities and local authorities through the resilience planning process. The outcome of this process is a Resilience Framework for Action (RFA), which defines priority actions, tangible activities and projects across short, medium and long-term planning horizons.
The Malawi government response: RAF as a tool for resilience
The Government of Malawi through the Lilongwe City Council operationalised the City Resilience Action Framework (RAF) tool to strengthen climate and disaster preparedness in urban areas. The tool promotes bottom-up planning through participatory risk mapping and stakeholder engagement processes.
The final output, the Resilience Framework for Action (RFA), is intended to mainstream resilience into municipal policies, budgets and institutional structures. In principle, this aligns strongly with informal settlement upgrading and ecosystem restoration, as both require integrated planning and participatory governance.
However, while CityRAP places local governments “in the driver’s seat,” the informal settlements-the passengers most exposed to risk—often remain only partially empowered. One participant from Mtandire summarized this concern powerfully
“We appreciate that the City Council is leading the resilience agenda, but here in Mtandire we are the ones living with the floods, the blocked drains, and the waste every day. We cannot remain passengers in decisions that affect our survival. If resilience is to work, the community must not just be consulted -we must be in the driver’s seat alongside the Council.” – WDC Member, Mtandire Settlement
Resilience building requires placing communities at the centre of planning and action. Residents of informal settlements experience climate risks firsthand and hold valuable local knowledge about their environments. For resilience efforts to succeed, communities must be active partners in decision-making, implementation and monitoring. This approach is beginning to take root through the Locally-Managed Finance for Urban Ecosystem Restoration Programme, which supports community leadership and locally driven ecosystem restoration in informal settlements across the two cities of Lilongwe and Mzuzu.
Finance from the ground up
The Locally-Managed Finance for Urban Ecosystem Restoration programme operates precisely within the informal settlements where vulnerability is most acute. Currently being piloted in Mtandire, Kawale and Chinsapo in Lilongwe and Salisbury Lines and Ching’ambo in Mzuzu, the programme supports community-led restoration of degraded urban ecosystems, including drainage systems, riverbanks, waste management spaces and green corridors, through savings-based, locally managed finance mechanisms. Rather than waiting for external funding, communities are mobilising their own resources – including their capacities, to drive ecological and resilience outcomes from the ground up.
Scope and purpose of the review
This review interrogates the extent to which the Lilongwe City Resilience Action Framework (RAF), developed through the CityRAP process, aligns with emerging grassroots, finance-driven resilience efforts taking root in the city’s informal settlements. At its core, the review asks a fundamental question: does the RAF move beyond symbolic acknowledgement of community participation to meaningfully integrate the financial mechanisms, locally generated data and resident-led ecosystem restoration initiatives that communities are already driving on the ground?
The distinction is critical. Acknowledging participation in principle is not the same as embedding it within formal planning, budgeting and accountability structures. This review therefore examines whether community schemes, ward-level environmental monitoring and locally managed restoration enterprises are genuinely reflected in how the RAF is designed, resourced and implemented or whether they remain at the margins of a framework that is still largely shaped by institutional priorities and top-down planning assumptions.
Urban growth and informal settlements: resilience at the margins
The rapid expansion of informal settlements in Lilongwe and Mzuzu is not merely a housing issue, it is a resilience issue. Settlements such as Mtandire, Kawale and Chinsapo (in Lilongwe) and Salisbury and Ching’ambo (in Mzuzu) illustrate the compound risks of flooding, poor drainage, blocked culverts and uncollected waste. As noted by Manda (2015), informal settlements are characterised by insecure tenure, inadequate infrastructure and limited access to services. While the Lilongwe RAF acknowledges flood risks and environmental degradation, the lived reality in informal settlements demonstrates a disconnect between city-level planning frameworks and neighbourhood-level action. For instance, flood risk mapping exercises conducted under CityRAP often identify hotspots, yet the financial and institutional mechanisms to address those hotspots at settlement scale remain weak and centralised.
Informal settlements occupy a structurally marginal position within urban governance. Their residents, predominantly low-income and lacking formal tenure, have limited leverage within city decision-making processes that are shaped by institutional interests and elite political calculations. Budgetary allocations for resilience and disaster risk management tend to favour visible, large-scale infrastructure interventions over the smaller, community-embedded actions that would most directly reduce vulnerability in informal settlements. This reflects a broader pattern in which the political incentives of local governments are insufficiently aligned with the needs of the urban poor.
This gap is where locally-managed finance becomes transformative. Community groups within informal settlements have demonstrated the ability to mobilise small but catalytic funds for drainage clearing, tree planting and waste sorting initiatives – actions that directly reinforce resilience but are often invisible in city-level budgets (Chinsinga, 2015; Chikukula, 2024).
Participation in practice: Inclusion or consultation?
The Resilience Action Framework (RAF) promotes participatory risk mapping and multi-stakeholder engagement. In Lilongwe, Ward Civil Protection Committees (WCPCs), Ward Development Committees (WDCs) have been operationalised as local resilience structures in informal settlements. This institutionalisation represents progress. It formally recognises settlement-level vulnerability and provides a governance entry point. Yet, participation has structural limitations. In many informal settlements, WCPC members are not adequately trained in climate risk analysis, ecosystem restoration planning or financial management. They are rarely involved in municipal budget formulation processes. As a result, participation has become consultative rather than transformative.
In contrast, the Locally-Managed Finance for Urban Ecosystem Restoration project shifts participation from consultation to control by embedding financial decision-making directly within community structures. In its second year, informal settlement groups in Lilongwe and Mzuzu will determine how pooled resources are allocated, whether toward rehabilitating drainage channels in flood-prone clusters, strengthening waste sorting enterprises to reduce blocked waterways or investing in tree planting to stabilise riverbanks and restore degraded ecosystems. This level of financial discretion transforms residents from contributors in planning workshops to active investors in their own resilience. Thus, where RAF establishes an inclusive and participatory planning framework, locally-managed finance translates that framework into tangible economic agency. In essence, RAF creates the space for participation; the locally-managed finance model gives communities the power to act within it.
Implementation and resource constraints: planning without purse strings?
CityRAP’s greatest strength is the production of a structured, evidence-based ten-year Resilience Framework for Action (RFA). Yet this same framework represents its greatest vulnerability, as translating plans into action remains severely constrained by chronic underfunding at city council level. This fiscal reality is stark. In the second quarter of 2024 alone, local authorities received K34.47 billion against an expected K42.5 billion – a shortfall of nearly K10 billion, compounding a K6.3 billion deficit already recorded in the first quarter of the same year (Nation Online, 2024). The consequences extend well beyond administrative inconvenience. When councils cannot fund basic services such as refuse collection and road maintenance, urban ecosystems deteriorate rapidly. Waste accumulates in drainage channels, green spaces are left unmanaged and the natural buffers that protect informal settlements from flooding and climate shocks are progressively eroded. In this context, underfunding is not merely a governance failure but rather it is a direct driver of environmental degradation and heightened climate vulnerability for the urban poor.
In informal settlements, the consequences of municipal underfunding manifest directly — community priorities such as flood mitigation proposals go unimplemented, waste management investments are delayed and communities are left dependent on unpredictable external support for environmental projects. Into this gap, the Locally-Managed Finance for Urban Ecosystem Restoration project offers something more significant than an alternative funding stream. It represents a meaningful redistribution of planning power and financial agency to the communities most affected by environmental degradation.
On the ground, this is already producing tangible results. In settlements across Lilongwe and Mzuzu, community-led waste management enterprises are operational, creating local employment while simultaneously cleaning drainage channels and public spaces that municipal services have been unable to maintain. These enterprises are deliberately inclusive, with women and girls at the centre of leadership and economic participation, challenging the gendered exclusions that have historically limited their role in both environmental governance and livelihood creation. Tree nursery initiatives are restoring green cover in areas stripped bare by rapid, unplanned settlement growth.
Yet community finance alone cannot transform urban systems at scale. Without deliberate integration into city-level resilience budgeting frameworks, locally-driven efforts risk remaining isolated pockets of innovation, visible in one settlement, absent in another and insufficient to influence citywide planning trajectories. The programme is collaborating with Lilongwe and Mzuzu City Councils to embed the restorative framework into municipal planning, positioning community capacities as central to urban resilience rather than peripheral. By integrating settlement-level capacities into city resilience systems as co-financing partners, the approach moves resilience from a top-down initiative to a shared investment anchored in local agency.
Data scarcity and scale misalignment
CityRAP planning often operates under conditions of limited granular data. While flood-prone zones may be mapped at city scale, micro-level vulnerabilities, for example blocked tertiary drains in specific informal clusters, are frequently under-documented.
Under the restorative programme, the Know Your City (KYC) initiative enables communities to generate highly detailed, real-time data about their environments, identifying which drainage channels clog first during heavy rains, which riverbanks are most prone to erosion and where waste hotspots repeatedly attract illegal dumping. This evidence is rooted in lived experience and daily observation. Yet, despite its precision and relevance, such community-generated data rarely finds its way into municipal information systems or formal planning frameworks, limiting its influence on citywide resilience strategies and investment decisions. Further, the absence of structured feedback loops between informal settlement data and city-level planning weakens overall resilience. Integrating community-generated data into the Lilongwe city RAP monitoring framework would strengthen both policy coherence and adaptive governance.
The Locally-Managed Finance for Urban Ecosystem Restoration programme is beginning to address this gap by establishing community feedback loops. These loops function as structured channels through which residents systematically observe, record and report on local environmental conditions including drainage blockages, flooding incidences, waste accumulation hotspots, vegetation loss and the progress of restoration activities. Critically, these feedback mechanisms extend beyond internal community reporting. Through KYC TV, communities are given a platform to share their lived experiences with a wider public audience, transforming local environmental knowledge into a powerful tool for both awareness and advocacy. What residents witness daily in their settlements, the blocked drains, the rising floodwaters, the shrinking green spaces, is brought into broader public discourse, creating pressure for institutional accountability and amplifying community voices in ways that formal planning processes have historically failed to do.
Political and institutional dynamics
Urban governance in Malawi is fundamentally shaped by a combination of severe institutional capacity constraints, including lack of financial resources and trained personnel and intense political dynamics, such as clientelism, excessive political interference and poor coordination between national and local governments (Chiweza 2015; Chiweza 2019). Local authorities often face political interference, limited fiscal autonomy, and fragmented mandates. In such contexts, resilience planning risks becoming symbolic rather than operational.
However, RAP’s emphasis on local empowerment is noteworthy and has to be applauded. By positioning city actors as primary drivers, it builds institutional confidence. Yet institutional strengthening must extend downward. Informal settlement institutions, WDCs, WCPCs, Block Leadership, savings groups, waste enterprises, women-led restoration initiatives, should be formally recognised as resilience actors within the RAF. Without this vertical integration, resilience remains administratively centralised and socially peripheral.
Recognising the community actors is very important because it is these very institutions that are holding resilience together on the ground. Savings groups are mobilising collective finance for ecosystem restoration without waiting for municipal disbursements. Waste management enterprises, many of them led by women, are maintaining drainage channels, clearing waste hotspots and restoring green corridors that formal service delivery systems have consistently failed to reach. Block leaders and Ward Civil Protection Committees are coordinating community responses to flooding and environmental degradation in real time, drawing on intimate knowledge of their settlements that no city-level plan can fully replicate.
Towards convergence: policy implications
To strengthen alignment between the Lilongwe Resilience Action Framework (RAF) and the Locally-Managed Finance for Urban Ecosystem Restoration project, several interconnected policy considerations have emerged.
Community finance mechanisms should be formally embedded within city resilience funding frameworks. This means recognising community-led financial structures not merely as grassroots initiatives, but as legitimate co-implementers in CityRAP delivery. Institutionalising these mechanisms ensures that local financial capacity is channelled into broader urban resilience goals rather than operating in isolation from official planning processes. In this regard, the recent increase of the Constituency Development Fund (CDF) to MK5 billion represents a significant, if underexplored, opportunity. If the forthcoming guidelines governing the fund’s allocation and use are designed with inclusivity and resilience in mind, the CDF could become a critical financing bridge between community-led initiatives and formal city planning frameworks, potentially channeling resources directly to informal settlement institutions such as savings groups, waste enterprises and restoration initiatives.
Ward Civil Protection Committees (WCPCs), WDCs, and other governance structures in informal settlements require structured capacity-building support. Targeted training in both ecosystem restoration planning and financial literacy would equip these committees to play a more substantive role in local governance, bridging the gap between community-level action and formal resilience frameworks. Equipping these committees with both technical and financial literacy skills would strengthen their ability to plan, implement and supervise locally managed restoration initiatives transparently and sustainably.
Equally critical is formal recognition of their roles within municipal systems, clear reporting lines to the City Council and access to timely information and data-sharing platforms. With defined mandates, institutional backing and practical tools, these governance structures can move beyond mobilization functions to become credible co-implementers of resilience interventions – effectively bridging the gap between community-level action and formal urban resilience frameworks.
The data generated by communities must be brought into city-level environmental monitoring systems. Developing clear mechanisms for integrating community-produced environmental data into official reporting would improve the accuracy and inclusivity of urban resilience assessments, while also validating the role of residents as active contributors to urban knowledge systems. One participant from Mtandire summarized this concern powerfully
“The data we collect in our community must find its way into the city’s systems. When we monitor what is happening in our environment, the flooding, the trees, the waste, that information should count in official reports. It would make the city’s resilience plans more accurate and more honest. And it would show that we, as residents, are not just recipients of plans made elsewhere. We are contributors. We know this place better than anyone.”- Federation Member, Chinsapo Settlement
Across informal settlements in Malawi, communities organised under the Federation of the Rural and Urban Poor are systematically collecting and aggregating data on household conditions, environmental risks, service gaps and locally identified priorities. Through settlement profiling, mapping, and routine monitoring, they are building a grounded evidence base that captures the lived realities of flooding patterns, waste accumulation points, land degradation, and infrastructure deficits. This community-generated data represents not anecdote, but structured knowledge, a resource that, if formally integrated into city systems, could significantly strengthen the responsiveness, equity, and precision of urban resilience planning.
Finally, ecosystem-based enterprises such as waste management cooperatives and tree nursery initiatives, particularly in settlements, should be repositioned as core resilience investments. Rather than framing these enterprises solely within a poverty alleviation narrative, policy should recognise them as strategic contributors to urban ecological and economic sustainability.
Conclusion: connecting policy to people, plans to practice
The Lilongwe City Resilience Action Plan (CityRAP) marks a commendable shift toward structured, participatory urban resilience planning, providing a coherent framework, aligning stakeholders and placing resilience firmly on the council agenda. Yet frameworks alone cannot build resilience. Real change happens in the drainage channels of Mtandire, along the restored riverbanks of informal settlements in Mzuzu, and through the savings groups of slum dwellers pooling resources to safeguard their communities from climate and environmental shocks.
CityRAP provides the map; locally-managed finance provides the fuel. The future of urban resilience in Malawi hinges on intentionally connecting these two engines. Policy must move beyond consultation toward co-production: institutionalising community-generated data in council systems, aligning constituency development funds with locally-managed grant facilities and recognising informal settlement structures as co-financing and implementation partners rather than passive beneficiaries. Urban resilience will endure where policy and people move together. The challenge ahead is not choosing between council systems and community-led solutions, but binding them into a single, reinforcing architecture for urban transformation.
FURTHER READINGS
Chikukula, A. et al. (2024) “Problems and Possible Solutions to Municipal Solid Waste Management in Malawi Urban Areas – An Overview.” Asian Journal of Environment & Ecology 23, no. 6 (2024): 42–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.9734/ajee/2024/v23i6553.
Chinsinga, B. (2015) The political economy analysis of urban governance and management in Malawi. Tilitonse Foundation
Chiweza, A. (2019). Political Economy Analysis of Urban Governance and Management in Malawi: An Updated Version. Tilitonse Foundation
Lilongwe City Council (2020). The City RAP for Lilongwe City-Malawi with Focus on Mtandire informal settlement
Malawi Government (2019). The Nation Urban Policy
Manda, M. (2015). Malawi Situation of Urbanisation Report. 10.13140/RG.2.1.2413.2960. Situation analysis of urbanisation in Malawi Report was prepared as background document for the urban policy preparation process
Msasa CM, Manda MAZC.(2025) Physical vulnerability of buildings to flooding in Lilongwe City, Malawi. UCL Open:
Environment. (7):05. Available from: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444/ucloe.3216
Mwale, J. (November 25, 2024). Funding woes choke council. The national newspaper
National Statistical Office. (2019). 2018 Malawi Population and Housing Census Report. Government Print
UN Habitat (2020). CityRAP tool, City resilience action planning tool. UN Habitat, Nairobi, Kenya
UN Habitat (2023). Malawi country brief. UN Habitat, Nairobi, Kenya
