Improving Food Security and Resilience in Drought Affected communities Malawi The priorities of the Project, complementary to the Malawi Government’s 2016-2017 Food Insecurity Response Plan (FIRP 2016-2017) are to augment existing cash-based interventions through the provision of cash transfers to enable the affected population to procure non-maize food items; rehabilitate communal sources of safe drinking water and conduct community based hygiene and sanitation campaigns; support farmers with small landholdings through training in sustainable agriculture and provision of initial farm inputs; and establishing information management systems to complement the effort of the government in surveillance and monitoring of natural hazards and health risks. Malawi is currently in the midst of a significant drought that has caused widespread food insecurity and a safe water crisis - a result of climate change and the El Niño phenomenon. The prolonged dry spell and erratic rainfall negatively affected crop production in much of the country during the 2015/16 agriculture season. The proposed intervention will form part of Malawi Red Cross Society (MRCS) overarching disaster risk management, climate-change adaptation and resilient livelihoods programming. The Project is complementary to the Food Insecurity Response Plan of 2016-2017 and will be a component of the over-all coordinated response of the national food cluster, co-chaired by WFP, and will be contributing towards the reduction of the overall funding shortfall. The intervention will allow support to direct beneficiaries during the first quarter of 2017, which is the peak of the response operations. Drought affected communities and households Machinga and Balaka Districts in Malawi