WATER: Miracle Man Eases Village’s Water Woes

Hermes Chimombo, a welder in his 50s, is a revered man in the impoverished Naotcha Township. Armed with rudimentary tools and a passion to ease people’s suffering, he has tapped a spring in the mountain above the slum to provide water for its 25,000 residents.

MALAWI: Village Chief Leads Fight For Maternal Health

In Ntcheu, a rural district in central Malawi, villagers have taken the fight against the country's high maternal mortality rate into their own hands. They have almost eradicated maternal deaths in the area by urging pregnant women to give birth in hospitals, under medical supervision.

MALAWI: Local Management the Tonic for Water Woes

Hop over a seep of filthy sludge behind a bathroom screened with ragged sacks, turn past the toilet with battered cardboard walls, crab between mud-brick shanties roofed with rusty metal... There: emerge into a small, neat yard where a dozen women and girls are filling plastic buckets from five water taps sticking out of concrete wall.

MALAWI: A Cellphone, a Bicycle and Sound Agricultural Advice

It is 11 am and Mary Jusa seems unconcerned by the sun beating hard on her back. Humming a traditional tune, she carries on uprooting weeds in her maize field between two water canals.

SOUTHERN AFRICA: Removing Barriers to Trade

Cecilia Gondwe waits in the shade of a tree at the Mwanza Border Post between Malawi and Mozambique. Somewhere inside, a clearing agent is completing elaborate paperwork on her behalf.

EDUCATION-MALAWI: Local Language Dictionary Released

The thickest book on secondary school teacher Hellen Ndalama’s desk is her indigenous language dictionary. It is also her most-used book.

MALAWI: Extra Money Allocated for Drought Relief

Maize farmer Anita Yunus has lived near the Mulanje Mountain in southern Malawi for over 30 years. And she does not remember there ever being a drought in the area.

MALAWI: Green Belt Initiative Taking Shape

Let the rains fail, even for several successive seasons, and Malawi should still be able to produce enough to feed itself.

RIGHTS-MALAWI: Blame Game While Children Suffer

Every morning 12-year-old Thomson Genti and his seven-year-old brother, Chifundo, emerge dirty and wretched from the squalor of their hideout behind the crowded shops in the commercial town of Limbe. It is the start of a day of begging, beatings from the older street boys and insults from passers-by.

AFRICA: Lost in the Tracking of Budgets

As Susan Muonanji and other vendors scrambled around one of the many transport busses to sell cabbages and tomatoes at a market along one of Malawi’s key roads, a national budget session had just started in parliament some 100 kilometres away in the capital city, Lilongwe.

AFRICA: Counting on Media for Good Governance

While campaigning in the last election, Margaret Roka Mauwa, Member of the Malawian Parliament, did not promise her voters that when she won she would buy them coffins.

RIGHTS: Police Force HIV Tests for Sex Workers

It was, Malawian police say, a routine sweep for criminals at one of the country’s busiest border posts. They were looking for criminals.

MALAWI: Surplus Crop, But We Are Starving – Farmers

In a country where maize crop surplus fills the national storehouses to capacity, farmers Ida and Montfort Salijeni and their four children have turned to wild tubers for food.