Malawi is currently off-track in terms of achieving the SDGs and the objectives set forth in the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy III (MGDS III). The main challenges hindering progress revolve around central and local governments' ability to design and implement the required systems - including policy frameworks, development plans, and monitoring and evaluation procedures - to effectively deliver critical services to communities.
To overcome service delivery challenges, the Government of Malawi and UNDP have designed a dashboard that will eventually allow district councils to continually collect data, evaluate data and coordinate service delivery based on real-time information. The dashboard colour codes villages to geographically illustrate communities suffering from multiple off-track SDGs, such as malnutrition, access to clean water, and food insecurity - so called 'hotspots'. As a result of SDG dashboard computations, service delivery can be better targeted and prioritised to the hotspots areas, where people are most at risk of being left behind. The hotpots initiative could also integrate village level aggregated multi-dimensional poverty index (MPI) values for visualisation by the SDG dashboard.