This sugarcane plantation in front of a government forest reserve is largely under community stewardship in Chiradzulu District. People from the village below take turns patrolling the area and raising awareness about the importance of not cutting down trees, as the forest serves as a vital source of water for their sugarcane and vegetable fields, as well as for domestic use. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By Charles Mpaka
BLANTYRE, Mar 31 2025 (IPS)

In Malawi, being a forest guard isn’t a glamorous, sought-after job. And it has often been quiet, enjoying almost no publicity – until recently amid the worsening crashing down of the country’s forests, which is making the occupation increasingly perilous.

In 2024 alone, a total of eight forest rangers got killed in separate incidents while in the line of duty, according to the Ministry of Natural Resources, which is responsible for the management of 88 forest reserves and 11 plantations across the country.

Malawi has not recorded such a high number of forest guard killings before, says the ministry, admitting that the hostility towards its frontline staff by illegal charcoal producers and loggers is getting alarming.

“People who are destroying our forests are on the loose. They are killing our forestry officials,” says Minister of Natural Resources Owen Chomanika.

He said this at a meeting his ministry had convened in January 2025 to discuss with other forestry sector players strategies to stem the tide of forest destruction in Malawi.

What prompted the meeting was a brazen operation on a government plantation on Zomba Mountain in the east of the country.

Over several weeks, young men armed with machetes, saws and axes, moving in groups numbering between 50 and 100, according to local media, invaded the plantation every morning, cutting down pine trees and carrying away the contraband through the streets of the city below in full public spectacle.

With government forest guards overwhelmed, the ministry had to engage the Malawi Defence Force and Malawi Police Service to crack down on the illegal operation.

Data from the Global Forest Watch show that between 2001 and 2023, Malawi lost almost a quarter of a million hectares of its 1.5 million hectares of tree cover. In 2023 alone, the country lost almost 23,000 hectares of tree cover, the highest forest loss Malawi has suffered in a single year since 2001.

This devastation is falling even on protected forests where the government deploys forest guards. As  deforestation mounts – driven by worsening poverty, ever-rising demand for charcoal for cooking and farmland expansion – these forest security staff have the unenviable task of pushing back the avalanche.

They are risking their lives by doing this.

On February 14, 2025, three forest rangers sustained various degrees of injuries after being attacked by people from villages around Kaning’ina forest in Mzimba District in northern Malawi. The incident happened when the guards intercepted eight people who were illegally cutting down trees in the forest.

Three days later, five forestry officers were wounded when community members around Chikala forest in Machinga District in the east pelted stones at them, their crime being that they had arrested some men from the village who they had found producing charcoal illegally in the reserve.

From being stoned to death to being hacked in the face to being chased and beaten by irate mobs, forest guards in Malawi are increasingly coming into the firing line as they go out to enforce the law. Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Natural Resources, Yusuf Nkungula, attributes the trend partly to internal challenges.

“The challenges may be structural and operational. Structural challenges may be grouped as the number of guards that are available at one particular time versus the number of offenders,” he says.

Operationally, he says, lack of proper equipment like guns means that the guards are unable to suppress the pressures they face from the offenders.

“Commonly, guards are attacked by offenders because they are not fully equipped to fight back. Because of this, in 2024 alone, eight forest guards were killed in the line of duty,” Nkungula tells IPS.

Sometimes, the ministry engages the Malawi Police Service, the Malawi Defence Forces and national parks and wildlife rangers to help with patrols in deforestation hotspots, but these are short-term interventions.

“These engagements are always very expensive; as such, they don’t happen continuously, hence still creating spaces for offenders to do illegal activities,” he says.

Currently, the forestry department has 806 guards deployed to forest reserves and plantations, way below the 4,772 forest guards which the department requires now, he says.

The department also struggles to equip even these few guards due to inadequate funding. Since 1998, not in a single year has the department received half of its budget requirement. According to Nkungula, the 2024-25 financial year was the worst, as Treasury disbursed only 30 percent of the budget for the department.

“On average, 40 percent of the budget has been accessed annually in the previous 5 years. The shortfall adversely affects the operations of the department at all levels, resulting in failure to achieve some important targets,” he says.

Notable challenges resulting from such financial shortfalls include failure to properly develop plantation forestry, fight increased forest fires, bust increased illegal charcoal production and exacerbate corruption, the ministry says.

Environmental activist Charles Mkoka says the attacks on forest guards and the inadequate funding paint a gloomy picture of forest governance in Malawi as some groups of people exploit the institutional weaknesses to become a law unto themselves.

“As a result, the future of the country’s forest resources is at great risk—an issue that should concern all Malawians,” says Mkoka, who is also Executive Director for the Coordination Union for the Rehabilitation of the Environment, a local organisation.

Mkoka says these hostile communities can be instruments of forest restoration, drawing lessons from other communities that have become agents of forest recovery and understanding the devastating impacts of forest destruction on people’s lives.

“We have forestry resources in some areas that have successfully recovered through natural regeneration and are now thriving. What this points to is the need for concerted efforts among communities and authorities in managing these resources.

“We also need to learn from the devastating effects of the recent cyclones that caused mayhem as a result of widespread ecosystem degradation,” he says.

The rapid rate of deforestation undermines Malawi’s 2063 aspiration of becoming a developing country that has more than 50 percent of forest cover and a deforestation rate below 0.22 percent a year.

In the agenda, Malawi sees environmental sustainability as key to sustainable development and advances development programming that minimises depletion of natural resources.

“Our underlying concern as a people is that while we might enjoy the spoils of the environment today, we owe it to future generations of Malawians to do so responsibly and sustainably with an ethic of care,” reads the blueprint.

As both forests and forest guards fall, putting Malawi’s development goals in jeopardy, the Ministry of Natural Resources is rolling up its sleeves for a fight.

Hoping for improved funding, it plans to recruit 2,466 more forest guards in the 2025-26 financial year. The process will continue until the target of 6,000, the number the ministry believes will be adequate for effective policing of Malawi’s forests.

Government is also focusing on deepening community participation to plug the shortages in forest security staff and enhance local stewardship in forest management.

In addition, since forest invaders are becoming more militant, unleashing armed terror on forest rangers, the department is bolstering the military capacity of its frontline staff.

“The winning formula in terms of tackling the offenders is to make sure that the department becomes paramilitary, as in parks and wildlife.

“To this effect, 205 forest guards have completed training in weapon handling. These trainings will continue until all officers are trained,” Nkungula says.

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Nature-based solutions in Malawi give the country opportunities to contribute to the removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere while also generating money. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By Charles Mpaka
BLANTYRE, Malawi, May 27 2024 (IPS)

Malawi is increasingly pitching carbon trading as a source of revenue it needs to bolster the economy, which is suffering from foreign exchange shortages caused by a large trade imbalance and being buffeted by several shocks, including the climate crisis.

Presenting the 2024–25 national budget in Parliament in February, Minister of Finance Simplex Chithyola Banda listed increased and more efficient carbon credit revenue generation among the strategic initiatives in the government’s economic recovery blueprint. 

“We want to make sure that Malawi considers carbon trading as one of the sectors where we can get revenue and boost the economy,” Chithyola Banda said.

With Malawi’s carbon potential estimated to be around 19 million metric tons annually, local climate lobbyists and economic analysts agree that Malawi can count on carbon offsets for revenue.

Julius Ng’oma, National Coordinator of the Civil Society Network on Climate Change (Cisonecc), says carbon trading can also boost Malawi’s biodiversity conservation drive and strengthen its contribution to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

“Carbon trading can provide incentives for managing trees and forests and all other initiatives that enhance carbon sequestration and are aimed at avoiding reducing greenhouse gases,” he says.

However, among the experts, issues of transparency and accountability in carbon trading are an increasing concern.

In 2012, the Department of Environmental Affairs in the Ministry of Natural Resources and Climate Change evaluated 15 projects with an estimated carbon reduction potential of around 2 million tons.

More firms have entered the market since then.

Today, these questions remain: How many credits have these carbon projects thus far produced? How much revenue has been generated from those credits? How much and in what way has that revenue been shared with communities that are at the coalface of implementing the carbon projects?

Ng’oma’s view is that Malawi has not benefited as much as it should have from such projects, “as the money realized mostly benefited the international project developers.”

He says concerns about global carbon trading are generally focused on the determination of prices for carbon credits and accounting mechanisms.

“Very few people understand these arrangements and they favor mostly experts in the Global North,” he says.

Minister of Natural Resources and Climate Change, Michael Usi, tells IPS that most of the projects that were under evaluation in 2023 were implemented under the Clean Development Mechanism and REDD+ as one way for Malawi to unlock resources from multilateral and bilateral donors for different development projects.

After the evaluation, Malawi registered 11 projects and accessed about USD 40 million in socio-economic development financing, he says.

However, Usi admits that there were no formal procedures for implementing these carbon initiatives, meaning that Malawi has not had a way to count credits and track revenue generated in an efficient way.

Most of those carbon projects were largely about the distribution of improved cooking stoves. According to the ministry, these stoves have been effective in stemming the tide of deforestation in the country and therefore reducing carbon emissions because “we believe they help in reducing the over-reliance on natural resources, especially wood.”

Among the early firms in the distribution of cook stoves as a carbon project in Malawi is the United States-headquartered C-Quest Capital, which is active in 21 countries, including Tanzania, Kenya, Burundi, Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and parts of Southeast Asia.

C-Quest Capital’s Chief Executive Officer, Jules Kortenhorst, says the company, established in 2008, has issued up to 9 million credits on the voluntary carbon market and has invested more than USD 40 million in Malawi since it started its projects.

For Kortenhorst, questions over transparency and accountability in the carbon market are not invalid. Part of the challenge, he says, is that many countries have not had internal administrative systems to be able to monitor and regulate the carbon market.

“When the Paris Agreement was negotiated, there was Article 6—the idea that countries would establish carbon markets among themselves—but setting up internal administrative systems has been hard because they didn’t know what the rules were.

“Unfortunately, it has taken forever for negotiators to make progress in creating a rulebook for Article 6. This has been a very large frustration—until lately,” he tells IPS.

Having administrative structures in place would help to organize carbon credit transactions and enable global South countries, like Malawi, to sell credits in places such as Switzerland or Singapore.

He believes that developing countries and projects, such as improved stove distribution, have the potential to have a strong impact on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

According to Kortenhorst, the historical responsibility for reversing climate change lies with developed countries because the carbon footprint per capita in countries like Malawi is small, particularly as compared to countries like the Netherlands or the United States.

“But the good news is that everybody can make a small contribution. Worldwide, the emissions associated with the lack of clean cooking are around 2 to 3 percent. This is not huge but it is not insignificant.

“But also, we know that if we have to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, we can use the beautiful invention of Mother Nature—trees. Looking at nature-based solutions, countries like Malawi have tremendous opportunities to combine better agriculture and restoration of ecosystems—all of which can contribute to the removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere while the country also generates money. So it is a win-win-win situation,” he says.

But to achieve all this, there is need for a mechanism to count credits in an appropriate manner.

“That’s where transparency and efficient verification systems come in. That’s not easy because we are still learning the technology to do that. But we are getting better at it,” Kortenhorst says.

The Ministry of Natural Resources and Climate Change acknowledges that without proper systems and procedures in place, Malawi has been facing difficulties in the reporting and declaration of carbon credits.

The government has now finalized the formulation of the Malawi Carbon Trading Regulatory Framework. Through this framework, the government hopes to have better oversight over the design, implementation, monitoring, and management of carbon markets.

The instrument focuses on project formulation, implementation, assessment of credits generated and benefits for the country and communities at large.

In addition, the National Determined Contributions (NDC), which the government updated in 2021 and whose implementation plan it launched in August 2022, provides a platform for carbon trading project developers to design projects that support Malawi’s targets in mitigation as part of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

In June last year, the government launched the Malawi Carbon Markets Initiative (MCMI). The institution will champion the implementation of the frameworks, action plans, and ongoing programmes that support carbon markets.

Through these efforts, Malawi is confident that it is taking carbon trading operations in its stride.

“With the coming in of organized structures and a regulatory framework for carbon trading, we have embarked on a journey to formalize and transition [earlier] respective projects into carbon trading,” Usi says.

The initiatives also inspire hope in campaigners like Ng’oma, who says the regulations and guidelines could maximize the benefits of carbon trading to local communities and Malawi in general.

The Ministry of Natural Resources and Climate Change is now moving to commission a study to assess the carbon potential of Malawi and the corresponding value in terms of money.

The expectation is that the assessment will provide a good estimate of the number of carbon credits that could be generated from different activities and a range for the value of those credits.

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IFAW recently translocated elephants into Kasungu National Park, which is on the Malawi-Zambia border. IFAW is implementing the Room to Roam initiative so that these elephants can have safe passage in the corridor. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By Charles Mpaka
CHIPATA, ZAMBIA, Nov 1 2023 (IPS)

As we approach the forest in the village to appreciate Andrew Mbewe’s beekeeping enterprise, a bee from a hive close to the edge of the natural woodland stings him on the cheek.

He steps back quickly, waving everyone away from danger, as he grimaces and grumbles in pain while trying to take out the stinger to prevent his face from swelling.

“That’s one of the duties they are performing,” he says through his gritted teeth about his 18 beehives in this forest.

He examines the tips of his index and thumb fingernails to see if he has taken out the bee’s poison-injecting barb.

“These bees are guardians of this forest,” he says. “They protect it from invaders. That’s one of the reasons this forest is still standing today.”

Across the villages along the Chipata-Lundazi road, which cuts through a landscape that stretches between Kasungu National Park in Malawi and Lukusuzi and Luambe National Parks in Zambia’s Eastern Province, one feature is likely to catch the eye: impressive stands of natural forests among villages and smallholder farms.

Andrew Mbewe has 18 beehives in this forest. He quit poaching. Now he leads a community conservation group that fights poaching and implements alternative livelihood activities such as beekeeping. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

In Mbewe’s village in Chikomeni chiefdom in Lundazi district, these indigenous forests are home to over 700 beehives belonging to more than 140 families.

The forest protection duty that the bees are providing is an unintended consequence of the beekeeping enterprise. Fundamentally, the communities are sucking money out of the honeycombs in these beehives through sales of both raw and processed honey, some of which find space on the shelves of Zambia’s supermarkets.

It is one of the livelihood activities which Community Markets for Conservation (Comaco), in partnership with the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), are implementing within the broader wildlife conservation strategy in the Malawi-Zambia landscape.

Comaco’s driving force is that conservation can work when rural communities overcome the challenges of hunger and poverty.

It says these problems are often related to farming practices that degrade soils and drive deforestation and biodiversity loss.

Therefore, Comaco works with small-scale farmers to adopt climate-smart agriculture approaches such as making and using organic fertilisers and agroecology to revitalise soils so farmers achieve maximum crop productivity.

It also supports small farmers to add value to their produce and attractively brand the products so they are competitive in the market.

With burgeoning carbon trading as another revenue stream, this wildlife economy is raking in promising sums for both individual members and their groups, communities say.

The cooperative to which Mbewe belongs has used part of its revenue to purchase two vehicles – 5-tonne and 3-tonne trucks – which the group hires out for income. The money is invested in community projects such as building teachers’ houses and hospital shelters.

Luke Japhet Lungu, assistant project manager for the IFAW-Comaco Partnership Project, tells IPS that these activities are making people less and less reliant on exploiting natural resources for a living.

“You will not find a bag of charcoal here,” Lungu challenges.

“Because of the farming practices we adopted, people are realising that if they destroy the forest, they also destroy the productivity of their land and their income will suffer,” he says.

Along the way, people are also learning to live with the animals.

“Animals are able to move from one forest to another without disturbance. For the bigger ones, such as elephants, which would cause damage to our crops, we have a rapid communication system through our community scouts who work with government rangers.

“We have occasions of elephant invasions from the three parks. However, we have learnt to handle them better to minimise conflict. It’s a process,” Lungu says.

One man who has learnt to manage the animals he once hunted is Mbewe himself.

A battle-scared poacher for nearly a decade from the 1980s, he terrorised the 5,000-square-kilometre conservation area on poaching missions.

For his operations, he used rifles he rented from some officials within the government of Zambia, he claims.

“They were also my major market for ivory and other wildlife products,” he says.

Apparently, without knowing it, Mbewe was actually supplying a far bigger transnational market.

For over 30 years, from the late 1970s, the Malawi-Zambia conservation area was a major source and transit route for ivory to markets in China and Southeast Asia.

Elephant poaching rocked the landscape resulting in the decline of the species. In Kasungu National Park, for example, according to data from the Department of National Parks and Wildlife in Malawi, elephant numbers dwindled from 1,200 in the 1970s to just 50 in 2015.

In 2017, IFAW launched a five-year Combating Wildlife Crime project whose aim was to see elephant populations stabilise and increase in the landscape through reduced poaching.

The project supported park management operations and constructed or rehabilitated requisite structures such as vehicle workshops and offices.

It trained game rangers and judiciary officers in wildlife crime investigation and prosecution.

It provided game rangers with uniforms, decent housing, field allowances, patrol vehicles and equipment.

It supported community livelihood activities such as beekeeping and climate-friendly farming.

It also thrust communities to the centre of planning wildlife conservation measures.

Erastus Kancheya is the Area Warden for the Department of National Parks and Wildlife for the East Luangwa Area Management unit where Lukusuzi and Luambe National Parks lie.

He says he sees these measures as enabling degraded protected areas like Lukusuzi National Park to “rise from the long-forgotten dust [and] awakening on the long road of meaningful conservation”.

Kancheya says engaging communities in co-management of the protected areas is also proving to be effective in the landscape.

Now, IFAW is leveraging this community partnership to sustain the achievements of the Combating Wildlife Crime project through its flagship Room to Roam initiative.

Patricio Ndadzela, Director for IFAW in Malawi and Zambia, describes Room to Roam as a broad, people-centred conservation strategy.

“This is an initiative that cuts across land use and planning, promotes climate-smart approaches to farming and ensures people and animals co-exist,” he says.

The approach aims to deliver benefits for climate, nature and people through biodiversity protection and restoration.

Room to Roam intends to build landscapes in which both animals and people can thrive.

In the process, some people are being transformed. Mbewe is one such person. From being a notorious poacher, he is now a ploughshare of conservation as chairperson of the Community Forest Management Group in his area. The cooperative enforces wildlife conservation and sustainable land management practices.

It is not easy work, he admits.

“There are hardened attitudes to change, and patience is required to teach. Sometimes, the earnings from the livelihood activities are insufficient or irregular. For instance, you don’t harvest honey every day or every month,” he says.

Yet, he says, the prospects are good and the challenges he faces now rank nowhere near what he encountered when he was a poacher.

One incident still makes him shudder: Stalking a herd of elephants at their drinking spot in Kasungu National Park one day, he came under unexpected gunfire from rangers.

“I was an experienced poacher. I knew at what time of the day to find the elephants and at what location. But the rangers saw me first. I was dead. I don’t understand how I escaped,” he says.

Today, on reflection, he regrets having ever lived the life of a poacher.

“I went into poaching for selfish reasons,” Mbewe says thoughtfully.

“Poaching was benefiting me only; the conservation work I am doing now is benefiting the entire community and future generations,” he tells IPS while rubbing the spot of the bee sting and looking relieved.

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People relocated to the Nakadanga Trust in Machinga District, Malawi, bemoan the lack of opportunities and schooling in the area they were relocated to live in. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By Charles Mpaka
BLANTYRE, Jun 30 2023 (IPS)

Located between two heavily-deforested mountains, Nakadanga Trust in Machinga District in southern Malawi looks lifeless.

It is isolated away from all other original communities. Here, the houses are made of mud bricks and they are grass thatched. There is no source of potable water in the area. There is no school nearby, no health centre and no shops for groceries.

When the members of the trust gathered to speak with IPS last month, one of the outstanding features among them was that there were more babies and children than could be expected.

“Early marriages are rampant here,” said one of the women, Merika Kapachika.

“There is nowhere our children can learn about the dangers of early marriages and early pregnancies. In the homes, there is nothing much to do.”

Kapachika is among the people that relocated to the area in 2006 under a government land resettlement programme.

Between 2004 and 2011, the Ministry of Lands implemented the Community-Based Rural Land Development Project with financial support from the World Bank.

The project involved moving what it described as “poor, land-poor and food insecure families” from the tea-growing districts of Thyolo and Mulanje in the south to Mangochi, Machinga, Balaka and Ntcheu districts in the eastern region.

There, people were resettled on land which the government had acquired from estate owners. The beneficiaries were organised into settlement communities called trusts.

At the time the project ended in 2011, over 15,000 families had been moved.

The World Bank’s Implementation Completion and Results Report Project, dated March 30, 2012, says the programme “fully” achieved its development objectives.

It says the programme succeeded in increasing both incomes and agricultural productivity of the rural families that moved.

According to the report, the incomes of the relocated families had multiplied by six; yields for maize and tobacco reached an average level of 50 to 60 percent higher as compared to communities in the surrounding areas; average maize and tobacco yields multiplied by 4 and 2.6 respectively as compared to the previous situation of the relocated households.

“Based on the promising results of this pilot experience of land acquisition and redistribution for smallholders, the Government of Malawi is willing to scale up the approach to the entire country with an objective of resettling at least 100,000 households,” reads the report in part.

However, alternative assessments expose the social and economic hardships the beneficiaries have suffered.

For example, a study of the project published in the South African Journal of Agriculture Extension in 2015 found that the relocated communities faced greater difficulties to access agricultural inputs, credit, markets and extension services to support their agricultural production and access to social services.

“As a consequence, household food and income security deteriorated after phase out of the project in 2011,” the study says.

In the six trusts which IPS visited in Machinga and Mangochi districts, where 90 percent of the 15,000 families were resettled, stories of regret are prevalent.

Mary Yalale moved from Mulanje District in 2007 and resettled in Mangochi. Initially, it looked promising. The people finally had enough land on which to grow crops. They realised a good harvest in the first few years.

“However, we did not have markets to sell part of our produce for money for us to meet other needs. Vendors took advantage. They would invade the area, buy our produce at exploitative prices, knowing that we were unable to take it to proper markets ourselves where we could earn better prices,” said Yalale of Kuma Trust.

Today, she said, they are poor such that some of them survive on piecework in the homes of the original communities.

“Our land has degraded because we are now turning to forests to produce charcoal and firewood, which our husbands take to town to make money.

“Up to now, we still do not have good relations with the original communities. They say we grabbed the land that should have gone to them. We are outcasts. The government does not give us cheap fertiliser like it does with the others. It makes us feel foolish that we agreed to come,” she said.

In Bweya Trust in Machinga District, there stands a relatively new primary school block.

Chairperson of the trust, Sowani Saidi, who is also chairperson of all the trusts of relocated people in the two districts, said it was not by the design of the government that they have a school in the area.

“We moved here in 2007. It has taken us more than 10 years of fighting with the district council for us to have this school here. We moulded bricks and collected sand for our children to have a school,” he said.

They may have the school now, but they are struggling to have the government build teachers’ houses. To date, there are no teachers’ houses at the school.

Many teachers for the school are based at the trading centre about 10 kilometres away.

“So most of them don’t come most of the time. They can’t walk, or they spend a lot hiring motorbikes to report for duties. When it’s the rainy season, there are no classes on many days because teachers don’t come. We have been asking the government to build the houses; nothing is happening,” he said.

IPS reached out to the Ministry of Lands, which implemented the programme, for its comment on these concerns. Its spokesperson, Enock Chingoni, did not respond.

However, senior officials at Mangochi and Machinga district councils, speaking on condition of anonymity as they are not authorised to speak on behalf of the government on the project, said the project did not have any integrated social and economic development activities.

The design was that once people resettled, another government programme, the Malawi Social Action Fund (Masaf), which was also financed by the World Bank, would bring public services.

“However, Masaf failed to deliver,” said one official who was part of the implementation of the programme in 2010 in Mangochi District.

Masaf, a product of the Malawi Poverty Reduction Strategy, was meant to ensure poverty reduction through activities implemented by local councils under the decentralisation policy. But decentralisation itself is generally considered as failed thus far.

“Up to now, the central government still controls much of the work of the government. We are on the receiving end of most of its decisions,” he said.

Asked if the council has any specific interventions in the resettled communities, he said there is none.

“Yes, we have development plans as a council; but we treat those people like anyone else. There is not going to be any development specific to them. At least not from the government,” said the official.

Gift Trapence, the chairperson of the Human Right Defenders Coalition (HRDC), a local organisation, faulted the project for not considering social services as a core component in its implementation.

“Such projects should not be breeding grounds for poverty. Rather they should empower citizens socially and economically,” Trapence said.

He urged the government to assess the settlements and come up with an actionable plan to address the public service access challenges they are facing.

For Kapachika of Nakadanga Trust they are no longer interested in such interventions.

“We have been here for more than 10 years now. All along, the government has known that we are suffering; it has done nothing.

“What we want now is it should take us back to where it uprooted us. There we had health centres. We had good roads and markets. We did not have to wait for our children to reach 8 years for them to start primary school. We were delivering our babies in hospitals, not in the bush. Government should take us back to our villages,” she said.

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Malawi’s Department of Disaster Management Affairs estimated that 2.2 million people had been affected by Cyclone Freddy, with at least 1 434 fatalities and about USD 1.53 billion in damages. Credit: Red Cross

By Charles Mpaka
SONJEKE, MALAWI, Mar 30 2023 (IPS)

In Sonjeka village in Mulanje district, which lies on the border with Mozambique in southern Malawi, destroyed crop fields stretch almost interminably after floods ripped through them when Tropical Cyclone Freddy pounded the country.

One of those fields lying in waste with its drying maize stalks flattened to the ground, if not ripped off altogether, belongs to Eliza Mponya.

A field close to a hectare in size, this has been the lifeline for the single mother and her four children.

Not that it gives her all the maize which the family needs for the whole year, but it still gets Mponya and her children enough to carry them close to the next harvesting season.

By her estimation, this year, she would have harvested maize that would have lasted the family until the end of November.

Crops destroyed by Cyclone Freddy, which left at least 676 dead and 650 000 displaced. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

“We had good rains here, and we were lucky because my son found piece work in Mozambique, and we managed some fertiliser through what he earned.

“But now, after all the hard work and just when we were close to reaping the rewards, we have this damage. It’s heartbreaking,” she says.

Malawi is in a mourning period, courtesy of the worst natural disaster to have struck the country in recent memory.

Exactly a year after the battering by tropical storms Ana and Gombe, whose devastation the country is yet to recover from, Tropical Freddy hit rather more brutally.

After barreling through Madagascar and Mozambique, the cyclone stormed into Malawi on March 11, 2023. From the afternoon of March 12, rain poured over 10 of the 13 districts in the southern region of the country for the next 72 hours.

Rivers broke their banks; furious waters gorged through unlikely landscapes, and, beyond anyone’s expectation, several mud avalanches pushed down giant boulders from mountainous areas that, in some cases, swept away entire villages and crushed homes and people below at night.

President Lazarus Chakwera declared it a state of disaster, calling for help, a plea to which both local and the international community have responded generously.

The scale of the destruction is unprecedented in any natural disaster Malawi has experienced. A draft situation report which the Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DoDMA), a government agency, released on Wednesday, March 29, shows that up to 2.2 million people have been affected thus far; 676 have been killed, and 538 are missing – many of them feared to have been buried in the mudslides and rubble of collapsed buildings or washed away to unknown lands.

At the appropriate time, the police will declare the missing people dead, DoDMA says.

According to the report, up to 2,000 people are nursing various degrees of injuries, some while still in the over 760 evacuation camps that are hosting over 650,000 that have been displaced in the affected districts.

Up to 405 kilometres of road infrastructure have been damaged, and 63 health facilities and close to a million water and sanitation facilities have been affected.

The worst hit of all sectors, according to the report, is agriculture, the mainstay of Malawi’s economy. Over 2 million farmers have lost their crops and livestock, and over 179,000 hectares of crop fields have been destroyed.

Mponya’s field is among those counted.

Her maize crop would have been ready for harvest sometime towards the end of April. Now floods have harvested it, and Mponya is broken.

“I have never experienced anything like this in my life,” she tells IPS.

On March 23, 2023, the Ministry of Agriculture launched its own assessment of the damage the cyclone has caused to the agriculture sector in the region. It is yet to release its report on the assessment and the interventions that it will undertake to bail out the affected farmers.

However, in effect, the cyclone has worsened the food security situation for millions of people for the year. This comes against the backdrop of the government distributing food to 3.8 million food-insecure households, an exercise meant to see them through to the next harvest, which is now struck by the storm.

In an earlier forecast, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET), a USAID-supported global food security monitoring activity, said the southern region could register a decrease ranging between 30 and 50 percent in the harvest of maize, Malawi’s staple crop and a key factor in the economy.

This, it said, would leave poor households running out of food stocks by end of August instead of October, as it usually happens with most such households in a good harvest year.

FEWSNET cited limited and delayed access to fertiliser for most subsistence farmers who rely on the government’s fertiliser subsidy programme that was rocked by logistical and procurement challenges in this growing season and due to high prices of the commodity on the normal market, which drove the farm input out of reach for most of them.

FEWSNET compiled the report before Cyclone Freddy lashed the country.

Christone Nyondo, a research fellow at MwAPATA Institute, a local independent agricultural policy think-tank, says the cyclone has effectively struck a blow on household food security in the region and the country.

According to Nyondo, families that have lost their food crops will struggle to cope without external help. He, therefore, suggests assistance for the affected farmers to replant short-duration maize varieties.

He further says crops that can still do well when planted under residual moisture should be promoted to provide a short-term coping mechanism for the households as they recover.

However, Nyondo argues that Malawi needs to invest in long-term and enduring disaster-proactive measures considering that these natural shocks will keep occurring in the face of climate change.

According to Nyondo, an agricultural economist, for a long time, Malawi has focused much of its efforts on post-disaster recovery. It is high time the country did a deep rethink of its policies and invest significantly in early warning systems and forward planning based on intelligence gathered from these early warning systems, he says.

“The specific interventions to safeguard food security will vary by season by the nature of the predicted disaster. If the predicted disaster is a widespread drought, then forward planning in terms of strategic investments in irrigation infrastructure will be key,” Nyondo tells IPS via email.

He adds: “But, in any case, we need to invest more in irrigation, storage and other critical infrastructure without waiting for disasters. That’s the surest way of safeguarding our food security. Yes, it will be expensive but it will also be necessary.”

Back in Mulanje district, Mponya has no idea how she will recover.

Unlike some people in her village, she has not suffered any damage to her house or the loss of any member of her family. But she says it is a tragedy of her life that for the first time as a farmer, the 51-year-old will harvest almost nothing from her field after months of toil, leaving her to face a year-long struggle for food.

Asked whether she has a way out, Mponya stares blankly and then says, “I don’t know what to do.”

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Attacks on the elderly are increasing in Malawi, often under the pretext that witchcraft is at play. Survivor Christian Mphande lived to tell her story, but there is a worrying increase in elder abuse. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By Charles Mpaka
BLANTYRE, Mar 17 2023 (IPS)

In December last year, a video clip went viral of two elderly women surrounded by a charged-up crowd and engulfed in a cloud of dust as they filled up a grave in a village in the Mzimba district in northern Malawi.

As the two elderly sisters laboured in the task, which men in Malawi traditionally handle, someone in the mob kicked one of the women, Christian Mphande, and sent her flying into the open grave.

What was their crime?

A young woman related to the two had died, and people in the village accused Mphande, 77, of killing the young woman through witchcraft.

To punish her, Mphande was forced to bury the dead, helped by the sister. She was assaulted, her belongings, such as livestock, confiscated, and she was banished from the village.

It was yet another incident in the spiralling cases of harassment of older persons in Malawi.

Mphande is alive – now living away from home but within the district, probably to forever grapple with nightmares of her experience and live with the physical evidence of a gap in her gums after she lost some teeth in the assault by the mob.

But several elderly have lost their lives in Malawi at the hands of mobs. Five older women were killed between January and February 2023, according to the Malawi Network of Older Persons Organisations (MANEPO), a coalition of human rights organisations in the country.

In 2022, 15 elderly women were killed and 88 harassed for various reasons, largely on accusations of witchcraft—a rise from 13 killed and 58 harassed in 2021.

MANEPO’s Country Director, Andrew Kavala, describes the abuses of elderly women as a scourge visiting the nation.

“As a society, we have failed our elderly. We have unjustified anger towards them. Whether driven by frustration due to survival failures, we are venting our anger on innocent people. This is a tragedy,” Kavala laments in an interview with IPS.

Top of the factors behind this terror is what he describes as “baseless belief in witchcraft and magic,” which, he says, some people blame for their personal misfortunes.

Colonial Witchcraft Act

Malawi has in force the Witchcraft Act, which came into existence in 1911 under British colonial rule.

According to the Malawi Law Commission, the legislation was enacted with the aim of eradicating what the colonialists considered as dangerous some practices such as trial by ordeal, the use of charms and witchcraft itself.

In effect, the Act assumes that witchcraft does not exist. That being the case, it is, therefore, an offence for anyone to allege that someone practices witchcraft.

It is also an offence for anyone to claim that he or she practices witchcraft.

In 2006, the government set up a Special Law Commission on Witchcraft Act to review the 1911 witchcraft law. It was in response to calls that the law is alien to the common belief in witchcraft among Malawians.

In a report, the Special Law Commission indeed found a common and strong belief in the existence of witchcraft.

“There is witchcraft or, at least, a belief in witchcraft among Malawians,” the report said, concluding, “It is not correct to argue that there is no witchcraft in Malawi for the sole reason that the practice is premised upon mere belief.”

“Consequently, the commission concludes that the existence of witchcraft should not be regarded as a doubtful but conclusive (thing),” said the Commission’s chairperson, Judge Robert Chinangwa, at a presentation of its report in 2021.

But human rights organisations trashed the recommendations of the Commission for the review of the law. In a joint statement, the organisations said by definition, a witch or wizard is someone who secretly uses supernatural powers for wicked purposes.

Assuming that the law is amended to criminalise the practice of witchcraft, there would be the difficult issue of evidence, they argued.

“It is a good law practice that for one to be convicted of a criminal offence, the prosecution must have proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

“However, witchcraft involves the use of supernatural powers. Therefore, proving the allegations would be very difficult in a court of law,” they said in a joint statement.

The Majority Believe in Witchcraft

There has been no conclusion since. That is, Malawi’s fight against abuse of the elderly on witchcraft-related accusations finds itself stuck on the rough edges between strong belief in witchcraft on the one hand and, on the other, that there would be no proof for its existence in a court of law if reviewed.

This belief in witchcraft is compromising Malawi Police Service’s efforts to clamp down on the abuses against the elderly, according to national police spokesperson Peter Kalaya.

“Our main challenge is that we work hard to enforce this law [Witchcraft Act] in a society where the majority believes witchcraft exists. As such, there is great resistance [to law enforcement],” Kalaya tells IPS.

The police’s situation is worsened by the fact that, in most cases, incidents of abuse of older women occur in rural locations remote from the nearest police stations. According to Kalaya, this sometimes negatively affects police response to provide a swift rescue of victims and arrest perpetrators.

He further indicates how the police sometimes evade the treachery of the witchcraft law.

“Most of the abuses older persons face fall within the general crime of mob justice such as being beaten, killed, their houses and property being burnt and being subjected to verbal insults,” he explains.

Wycliffe Masoo, Director of Disability and Elderly Rights at the Malawi Human Rights Commission (MHRC), a public body, says witchcraft belief in itself is not to blame; it is what happens as a result of that belief that is of concern.

“The question that remains is that if witchcraft exists, is it being practised by older persons only?” Masoo wonders.

He says while police have at times been swift in arresting and investigating suspects for abusing the elderly, the wheels of prosecution take too long sometimes and give the abuses an edge.

Legislation Already in Place

According to Masoo, whether Malawi sticks with the Witchcraft Act or reviews it and contends with the tricky challenge of proving witchcraft in a court of law, the country already has some legislation in place which, if properly used, would ably curb issues of mob justice on older persons.

For example, the Constitution prohibits discrimination of persons and guarantees “equal and effective protection against discrimination” on whatever grounds.

It guarantees human dignity, stating that “no person shall be subject to torture of any kind or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

What Malawi needs, according to MHRC, Manepo and the police, is to expedite the enactment of the Older Persons Bill into law and invest in a formidable, coordinated mass awareness that brings along traditional, religious and judicial leadership for all Malawians to understand the rights of older persons.

“This will wholesomely protect older women,” Masoo says.

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Patients in Africa often cannot access treatment as per the WHO hepatitis B guidelines. Now researchers have found a way to improve the diagnosis and care of people living with hepatitis B. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By Charles Mpaka
BLANTYRE, Mar 2 2023 (IPS)

Researchers have found that cheaper and more accessible blood testing methods can improve the care of patients with chronic hepatitis B in Africa.

In a study published in Nature Communications, the researchers recommend revising the current World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines on managing the condition.

“Our data are important for informing clinical practice in [Sub-Saharan Africa] and should be considered in the next revision of the WHO hepatitis B guidelines,” say the researchers who make up the Hepatitis B in Africa Collaborative Network (HEPSANET).

Lead author of the study, Asgeir Johannessen, tells IPS that clinicians working in Africa have “repeatedly reported that very few patients in Africa” are eligible for treatment using the current WHO guidelines published in 2015.

“The lack of data from Africa is a major challenge, and we wanted to use African data from African patients to inform African treatment guidelines,” says Johannessen, a specialist in internal medicine and infectious diseases at the Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Oslo in Norway.

According to the study, Africa represents one of the high-burden regions for chronic hepatitis B virus. Of the estimated 316 million people that live with chronic hepatitis B virus infection worldwide, 82 million are in Africa.

The research further says that antiviral therapy effectively reduces the risk of complications resulting from hepatitis B virus infection.

But with current WHO-recommended guidelines, early diagnosis and treatment are impacted because often only picked up when there is advanced liver damage.

The challenge in clinical practice in Africa has been to identify patients at risk of progressive liver disease who should start antiviral therapy in good time.

“In resource-limited settings, however, these fibrosis assessment tools are rarely available, and antiviral treatment is therefore often delayed until the patients have developed symptoms of advanced chronic liver disease,” the research paper says.

So, the researchers set out to deal with this question: “Can we diagnose advanced liver fibrosis in the Africa region, using routinely available and low-cost blood tests for patients with hepatitis B?” says Alexander Stockdale, a member of the team and senior clinical lecturer at the University of Liverpool and Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Programme.

In the study, the 23 researchers reviewed data for 3,548 chronic hepatitis B patients living in eight sub-Saharan African countries, namely Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Malawi, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Zambia.

They evaluated the existing WHO treatment guidelines and a simple liver damage biomarker developed in West Africa.

They established that the conventional hepatitis B care standards are unsuitable for patient management in Africa. They found that the diagnosis level as set by the WHO “is inappropriately high in sub-Saharan Africa,” which is often constrained by a lack of resources.

The problem, the researchers say, is that the existing WHO guidelines are not adapted for the African population.

The study that informed these guidelines was performed among active chronic hepatitis C patients in the USA, much older than Africa’s hepatitis B virus population and on a very different patient population compared to African chronic hepatitis B patients.

“Our data are important for informing clinical practice in SSA [Sub-Saharan Africa] and should be considered in the next revision of the WHO hepatitis B guidelines,” says Johannessen.

He says they have shared their findings with the WHO and the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in Africa.

“We believe our findings will inspire the first ever African hepatitis B treatment guidelines, and even the WHO is now changing their guidelines because of our work,” he tells IPS.

“Africa is now the epicenter of the hepatitis B epidemic. In fact, 2 of 3 new infections occur on the African continent. To combat the hepatitis B pandemic in Africa, we need African data to inform practice,” Johannessen says.

Initially, the researchers thought their main challenge would be to get people to share data.

“But in fact, everyone we reached out to were eager to participate. It is obvious that this is a topic that feels like a priority to colleagues working throughout Africa,” he says.

The study is the largest, most comprehensive, and geographically representative analysis ever conducted in Africa.

“We, therefore, believe our results are generalizable,” the researchers conclude.

However, they admit some limitations of their study. For example, the method used to assess liver damage has been associated with technical limitations, including unsuccessful measurements reported in patients with certain health conditions such as obesity. The researchers did not ascertain the rates of failure of these tests.

“This may affect the overall applicability of our findings to the entire population with HBV,” they say.

But Adamson Muula, Professor and Head of Community and Environmental Health at the Kamuzu University of Health Sciences (KUHES) in Malawi, says in terms of the methodology used in this study, the systematic review of data was relevant in answering the question at hand.

“In the hierarchy of evidence, systematic reviews and meta-analyses are high up with respect to the rigor of the findings,” says Muula, who was not part of the research.

He noted, however, that there are downsides to this approach, including the fact that in the interpretation of the findings, there is an implicit sense that Africa is one place. Muula argues that African health systems can be different even within the same country.

Within a country, you can find a health system comparable with developed countries; others are more closely aligned to developing countries. The studies applied more to those with less sophisticated health systems.

Regardless, the study is vital, he acknowledges.

Hepatitis B diagnosis on the continent has been a luxury. In Malawi, for example, where 5 percent of the adults are estimated to be infected, virtually no screening or diagnostic system exists.

Individual patients may interact with the health system, but more so when things are already out of hand when irreversible liver damage has already happened.

“Efforts to reduce the time at which diagnosis can happen are therefore commendable. This study adds guidance as to when such earlier diagnosis may be attained.

“However, research is one thing, health systems strengthening another. Studies like this one add to the impetus and arm the policymakers to make the right decisions,” he says.

But he urges communities to take charge of these findings instead of leaving action in the hands of “sometimes incapacitated policymakers’ hands.”

“The question should be, what is the community saying about findings such as these? If we wait for policymakers to decide when they are going to invest in hepatitis B interventions, we will wait for the rest of our lifetimes.

“Time has come for community groups to work with the duty-bearers to the extent that hepatitis B is not a neglected tropical disease anymore,” he says.

The WHO’s goal is to have hepatitis eliminated by 2030.

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Cholera ward in a health centre in Blantyre. Malawi has experienced a massive rise in cholera in the past year. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By Charles Mpaka
BLANTYRE, Jan 9 2023 (IPS)

On March 3, 2022, Malawi declared a cholera outbreak after a district hospital in the southern region reported a case. This was the first case in the 2021 to 2022 cholera season.

That single case was a warning for what would become Malawi’s worst cholera outbreak in decades.

For nearly a year now, cholera has gripped the country, with cases reported in all 29 districts and rising.

In an unprecedented occurrence, the cases rose sharply even through the summer months when cholera is least expected and the country least prepared for it.

As of January 4, 2023, up to 704 people were killed, and 21,000 cases were registered, government data shows. The case fatality rate stands at 3.4 percent, higher than the recommended rate of less than one percent.

Maziko Matemba, Executive Director for Health and Rights Education Programme (HREP), a local civil society organisation, says the situation is alarming and keeps the country in a “spiral of health crisis”.

“We started the year 2022 hoping to recover from the devastation of Covid-19. Then Tropical Storm Ana knocked us back in January. In March, cholera hit, and it hasn’t left for ten months, worsening as time passes. We have not had this kind of cholera outbreak for a long time,” Matemba tells IPS.

And there are growing fears that the disease could spread further now that the rainy season when it usually breaks out in Malawi, has begun.

Tropical Storm Ana has played a significant part in this outbreak, experts say. The rainstorm affected 16 districts, including Machinga, where the first cholera case was reported in March, and Nsanje, a flood-prone district and one of the first areas to report cholera cases in this outbreak.

A final situation report on the impact of the storm by the Department of Disaster Management Affairs found that over 53,000 latrines collapsed, while 337 boreholes, 206 water taps and eight gravity-fed water schemes were damaged in those 16 districts.

The department said this resulted in low sanitation coverage, limited access to safe water and poor hygienic practices, with some sites and communities reporting open defecation and contamination of the few available water sources.

The report said the situation increased the risk of cholera and other communicable diseases.

“As such, safe water supply, sanitation and hygiene services are immediately needed to address water, sanitation and hygiene issues. Furthermore, there is a need for rehabilitation of toilets to avoid infectious and waterborne diseases,” it said.

But Malawi has not fully recovered from this disaster since, Matemba says.

“So lack of recovery on water and sanitation infrastructure destroyed during that time have created good conditions for cholera to thrive. That comes into an existing frame of a weak prevention system. We usually take prevention rather casually,” he says.

Save Kumwenda, an environmental health expert, says alongside the water, sanitation and hygiene issues, there is also evidence of temperature and precipitation being influential in cholera outbreaks – with temperature driving epidemics and rainfall acting as a dispersal mechanism.

“Then there are also socio-economic conditions which are key drivers for outbreaks, as these increase pathogen exposure,” says Kumwenda, an associate professor at the Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences (MUBAS).

He says the situation could worsen as the rainy season spreads the bacteria through contamination of water bodies and food.

The outbreak has hit the hardest Malawi’s two major cities of Lilongwe, the capital city, and Blantyre, the commercial city.

For instance, in the 7 days between December 29, 2022, and January 4, 2023, the country recorded 2,773 cases and 137 deaths. Out of these, Blantyre and Lilongwe contributed 47 percent of the new cases and 53 percent of the new deaths.

Kumwenda says this is the case because the two cities, struggling with solid waste management and aged sewer systems, have large peri-urban areas where residents depend on wells, boreholes and river water which is highly contaminated by faecal matter from toilets, broken septic tanks, broken sewer pipes and open defaecation.

He says most houses in these areas do not have adequate toilets, and many depend on sharing.

In addition, most of these households cannot afford to pay for water from waterboards for both drinking and domestic use. They, therefore, prioritise safe water for drinking only and unsafe water for other uses, which leads to contamination of foods and utensils and also contamination of the available safe water.

“The other reason for the high numbers of cholera cases in these cities is the high number of people who rely on piece works, and these rely on foods sold in markets where hygiene and sanitation conditions are compromised,” he says.

In response, the government has delayed by two weeks the opening of schools in the two cities and surrounding areas. Malawi opened the 2022 academic year on January 3.

Minister of Health Khumbize Kandodo Chiponda says in a statement that opening schools in the two cities would affect containment efforts for the outbreak, considering that cholera is passed from one person to another through contaminated food, water and inadequate sanitation facilities, a feature that exists in school settings.

“The converging of learners, especially in the nursery, primary and secondary schools, increases the chances of uncontrolled spread of the vibrio bacteria that causes cholera disease,” she says.

During the two weeks delay, the government will be conducting a thorough assessment and improving the water and sanitation situation in the schools in both cities.

For a national response, among other measures, the government says it will be opening more treatment centres in the cholera hotspots, employing more staff in the treatment centres, intensifying hygiene promotion and undertaking water quality assessments in targeted areas.

In November last year, Malawi rolled out the oral cholera vaccination reactive campaign targeting 2.9 million people aged one year and above.

Kumwenda says Malawi needed to act quickly to stop the outbreak before the onset of the rainy season as there was clear evidence of the impending emergency due to the rising of the cases through the hot months.

But for long-term control of the disease, Malawi needs to invest in research in order to come up with interventions based on evidence.

“This will ensure that we always invest in interventions which yield maximum benefits. We need to understand the main drivers of the epidemic and also identify reservoirs of the bacteria causing cholera. The knowledge of the reservoirs will help us to easily prevent the re-occurrence of the outbreak,” says Kumwenda, president of the Malawi Environmental Health Association, a group of environmental health experts.

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A child is vaccinated against the poliovirus. Malawi detected a single case and embarked on a mass vaccination programme against the disease which causes paralysis. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By Charles Mpaka
Blantyre, Malawi, Apr 18 2022 (IPS)

One polio case is one too many, global health experts say.

And when Malawi announced in February this year that it had detected a polio case in the country’s capital Lilongwe, the alarm was significant, and the response from both the government and global health partners was swift, if not frantic.

Detected on a 3-year-old child, the poliovirus is described by experts as a significant public health concern for several reasons.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), polio has no cure, and it is a highly infectious disease.

“It invades the nervous system and can cause total paralysis within hours,” said WHO in a statement released on February 17, 2022, upon the Malawi Government’s announcement of the outbreak.

Furthermore, Malawi has not registered any cases of polio in 30 years. The country last reported a case of poliovirus in 1992.

In 2005, Malawi obtained a polio-free status.

The WHO further says that the last case of wild poliovirus in Africa was detected in northern Nigeria in 2016. Globally, there were only five cases of wild poliovirus recorded in 2021.

In addition, according to the United Nations health body, Africa was declared free of indigenous wild polio in August 2020 after eliminating all forms of wild polio.

To date, says WHO, polio remains endemic in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and laboratory test results on the case in Malawi showed that the strain was linked to the one found in Pakistan’s Sindh Province.

“As long as wild polio exists anywhere in the world, all countries remain at risk of importation of the virus,” Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa, said upon the announcement.

Immediately after the outbreak, the government declared a Public Health Emergency.

It also instituted risk assessment and surveillance measures to contain any potential spread of the virus – but it assured that there was no evidence that the poliovirus was circulating in the community. There are no reports of additional cases of polio thus far.

Within 72 hours, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) Rapid Response Team arrived in the country to support the outbreak response.

These efforts were followed by a mass vaccination campaign, the first of four rounds, targeting 2.9 million children under five.

UNICEF procured 6.9 million polio vaccine doses for exercise.

UNICEF had partnered with WHO and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s Gavi, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rotary and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in supporting the Ministry of Health to vaccinate children in four mass campaigns.

The phase ran from March 21 to 26, 2022.

A Poliovirus Outbreak Response Situation Report released by the government on April 4 says 2.97 million children aged between 0 – and 59 months had been vaccinated in the campaign, representing 102 percent administrative coverage.

The Ministry of Health says it is delighted with the campaign’s success.

“We attribute this to the dedicated workforce, the door-to-door approach and low presence of misconceptions, misinformation and disinformation surrounding polio vaccine,” the ministry’s spokesperson, Adrian Chikumbe, told IPS.

But the campaign was affected by some challenges, the Ministry of Health acknowledges in the vaccination campaign review report.

Malawi is reeling from the impacts of cyclones Ana and Gome, which hit the country in January this year, leading to flooding in many parts of the country and displacement of close to a million people. According to the report, the dispersion of the communities due to flooding increased the workload for vaccination teams.

“Polio campaigns with house-to-house strategy have not been conducted in-country in more than ten years, resulting in house-to-house vaccination not being strictly being followed in some areas. Grassroot social mobilisation was also delayed in some communities,” adds the report.

The second phase of the polio vaccination campaign is slated for late April.

“We urge all of us to sustain the gains in the first round of the campaign by making sure no eligible child is left behind in the subsequent rounds of the campaign. That way, our children will be adequately protected against polio which leads to paralysis or even death,” says Chikumbe.

UNICEF says the re-emergence of the wild poliovirus in Malawi, three decades after it was last detected, is “cause for serious concern”.

“Vaccination is the only way to protect the children of Malawi from this crippling disease which is highly infectious,” says UNICEF representative in Malawi, Rudolf Schwenk.

According to UNICEF, as an epidemic-prone, highly contagious disease, polio can spread easily through the movement of people from endemic to polio-free areas.

This polio vaccination campaign comes nine months after Malawi also administered another polio vaccination drive in July last year when the country undertook a week-long catch-up campaign that targeted 1.8 million children who missed the vaccine earlier.

Ministry of Health says the vaccination campaign last year was intended to immunise all children born after the world had switched from the Trivalent Oral Polio Vaccine (tOPV) to the Bivalent Oral Polio Vaccine (bOPV). The bOPV is said to protect children against all three types of polioviruses.

Community health activist Maziko Matemba tells IPS that one case of polio is one too many because of the high rate of spread of the virus and the severity of its effects.

“You need a rapid response to forestall its spread. You may not manage it if it slips through, so immunisation is key,” says Matemba, also executive director for Health and Rights Education Programme (HREP), a local non-governmental organisation.

But he says the re-emergence of the case after 30 years in Malawi should remind the government of the need to ensure the health system’s resilience.

He says this resilience can be achieved through adequate funding to the health sector.

“As a country, we need to ensure that our health system is resilient and robust. One way we can make it such is by meeting the Abuja Declaration on Health to allocate at least 15 percent of the national budget to the health sector.

“Twenty-one years after that declaration, we still can’t go past 10 percent in budget allocation to the health sector. Without sufficient funding, outbreaks of this nature can spiral out of control, and we will struggle to contain other health shocks,” Matemba says.

Since the last case in 1992, Malawi has sustained its polio surveillance through an independent committee of experts that oversees and coordinates the country’s polio monitoring and reporting system.

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Residents survey the damage after Cyclone Ana triggered winds and floods in Malawi. There has been a call following the latest flooding for climate-resilient approaches to WASH because damaged infrastructure, especially water infrastructure, has serious health consequences. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By Charles Mpaka
Blantyre, Malawi, Feb 22 2022 (IPS)

On the night of January 24, 2022, as Cyclone Ana-triggered rains incessantly rattled on the rusty roof of her house, amid intervals of gusty winds, a thud woke up Josephine Kumwanje from her sleep.

Her heart leapt as she thought thieves had broken into the house.

She summoned some courage, tiptoed to the door of her bedroom, and peered into the dark. She did not see any evidence that the house had been burgled. The windows and the main door were intact.

But she could not sleep because the rain poured down in torrents – until the early hours of the morning when it reduced to a drizzle.

“In a long time, I haven’t seen a combination of heavy rains and strong winds in one night,” she recalls.

In the morning, she saw what that thud was all about: The pit latrine behind her house had collapsed, the slab caving into the hole so that the toilet was no longer usable.

Kumwanje’s latrine was one of the five that had collapsed in the neighbourhood that night. The storm had ripped off the roofs of three houses, and gullies were gorged into areas. The residents could not imagine that such damage was possible.

The tropical depression that formed to the northeast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean around January 21 and swept into the Mozambique Channel caused heavy and incessant rainfall in Malawi on January 24 and 25, resulting in heavy flooding and destruction.

Two cities and 16 of the country’s 28 districts, mainly in the Southern region, had been affected.

The Department of Disaster Management Affairs said in a situation report that between January 24 and February 12, 2022, shows close to one million people had been affected, 190,000 displaced, 46 people killed, and 18 people still missing.

Among the sectors severely hit was water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), including the five latrines in Makhetha Township in Blantyre City – even though they were far away from the ‘eye of the storm’.

A rapid assessment by the WASH cluster of the response team, co-led by UNICEF, has found that over 1,000 boreholes, the primary source of potable water in most rural areas in Malawi, have been destroyed.

Residents walk past storm damage from Cyclone Ana. The storm impacted one million people with 190,000 displaced, 46 people killed, and 18 people still missing. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

Countless more have been contaminated, while 20 piped water schemes have been damaged, leaving an estimated 300,000 people with no or limited access to safe water. A total of 53,962 latrines collapsed.

According to UNICEF, the destruction of the WASH infrastructure could have far-reaching health consequences.

“These conditions entail significant risks of health outbreaks (cholera) with medium to long-term impacts on the health status of children,” Michele Paba, UNICEF Malawi Chief of WASH, tells IPS.

Worse still, the current floods compounded the damages from other recent floods and have reversed progress on recovery.

In March 2019, Malawi was one of the three countries – together with Zimbabwe and Mozambique – through which Cyclone Idai related flooding swept, destroying infrastructure, and affecting more than one million people in the three countries.

In January 2015, Malawi also suffered devastating floods, which killed 106 people, displaced more than 200,000 and affected more than one million people.

The floods also hit twelve of the 17 districts affected by floods in January 2015.

Five of the districts affected this year were the worst hit by Cyclone Idai in 2019 and were among those hardest hits by the 2015 floods.

Details in the Malawi 2015 Floods Post Disaster Needs Assessment Report show the floods had destroyed water facilities such as intake structures, water treatment plants, water supply pipelines, dams, and shallow wells.

The government pegged the recovery and reconstruction budget following the 2015 disaster for the WASH sector alone at 60 million US dollars.

But, as Charles Kalemba, Commissioner for the Department of Disaster Management Affairs, which is in the Office of President and Cabinet, indicates, Malawi has never recovered from these disasters.

“Floods have happened in this country several times in the past few years. In recent times, we had one in 2015. We had another in 2019, and now these. They happen, they attract our attention, and we forget soon afterwards. We have not been good at recovery and resilience at all,” Kalemba says.

Back in Blantyre, Kumwanje rebuilt her latrine in a week.

“I have children. For dignity and hygiene, I could not count on neighbours’ toilets,” says the mother of three, who earns a living selling second-hand clothes.

But the structure, made of plastic sheets, is temporary. It cannot withstand a similar storm.

Kalemba says the country needs serious work in preparedness and resilience, adding that the department is now eyeing a radical shift in strategy.

“We need to relook at financing. The money should not just be used to buy top-of-the-range vehicles for offices. We need to tackle real issues affecting people in the long term.

“Besides, we leave our response in the hands of development partners, but we can see people in these affected areas are becoming poorer. That shows us that the strategy we are using is not working. We need to take full control of the recovery processes, including finding our own resources, instead of waiting for donors,” he says.

In terms of WASH, according to UNICEF, the sector is “aggressively moving towards climate-resilient approaches to improve the sustainability of water and sanitation services and ensure value for money of investments made.”

“The main bottleneck at the moment,” says Paba, “is the lack of financial resources to address the needs because official development assistance has drastically declined over the past years and government allocations are limited.”

A February 2020 UNICEF analysis of public expenditure on the WASH sector in Malawi says that despite limited fiscal space, the government has increased budget allocations to the sector since 2017-18.

Between 2014 and 2019, the government funding averaged 0.39 percent of total expenditure, or just under 0.1 percent of GDP – with much of it heavily tilted towards water.

However, the report notes that Malawi’s budget allocations to WASH as a proportion of GDP is low compared to other countries in the region.

Apart from proposing the government adjusts to reductions in external funding and fixing the frontline staff deficit, the report recommends increased government financing towards WASH, especially for operations.

Paba tells IPS that the Ministry of Water and Sanitation, with support from UNICEF, is developing a climate-resilient financing strategy to help mobilise fresh investments to address sector needs and create a climate risk-informed investment plan.

The government, through the National Sanitation and Hygiene Strategy (2018 – 2024), is targeting increasing the number of households with improved sanitation access from 13.8 percent as it was in 2018 to 75 percent by 2030 and increasing the number of people accessing safe water supply from 83 percent to 90 percent by 2030.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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A waste collection bin awaiting the city council's collection. Markets are one of the places the SADC hygiene strategy is targeting. The picture was taken around 5 am as people gathered for the market day. It is a stone’s throw away from the health centre featured in the story. ​Credit: Charles Mpaka​/IPS​​

By Charles Mpaka
Blantyre, Malawi, Jan 10 2022 (IPS)

The toilets in the maternity wing of Namatapa Health Centre in the populous Bangwe Township in Blantyre, Malawi’s commercial city, fell into disrepair a few years ago. So, pregnant women who come to deliver their babies and their guardians use two pit latrines.

The faulty facilities also serve as bathrooms.

Visiting the bathrooms and toilets is an act of courage, says Thokozani Paulo, who spent four days at the centre in November 2021, during the birth of her first child.

“When you want to bath or relieve yourself, the image is dreadful because half the time, there is a mess, and the stench is terrible,” she tells IPS.

At night, there is no light, and the rooms are swarming with mosquitoes.

In addition, there is not much dignity and privacy for users either. There are no doors, so women improvise using their wraps for privacy.

“So, you are bathing, and someone comes in looking to relieve themselves,” says the 23-year-old in an interview with IPS at her home. Her month-old baby girl is sleeping peacefully on her lap.

Workers at the facility clean the two toilets – but without detergent and only once every day in the morning. One day, the women in the ward and their guardians pleaded with the workers to clean the toilets at least twice a day.
“They shouted at us saying we were not the ones paying their salaries and that we should just focus on what we had gone to the health centre for,” Paulo says.

The only basin for handwashing in the ward was never supplied with soap in the four days she was at the health centre.

In November, this experience, and the experiences of many others like Paulo were top of the agenda at a meeting of health ministers from the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe.
At that meeting, among other things, the ministers endorsed the SADC Hygiene Strategy (2021-2025).

According to the strategy developed by the SADC Secretariat, analysis of national blueprints in the region on health, water, sanitation, environmental health, and nutrition indicates there is “an enabling environment” for implementation of hygiene practices.

However, there are still considerable gaps in most of the 16 member states.

“There is still need to mainstream and integrate hygiene in most of the national policies in order to broaden the enabling environment base for effective and sustainable promotion of hygiene practices,” it reads.

The framework, therefore, challenges SADC governments to increase hygiene coverage and behaviour change across all settings. These settings include health care facilities, schools and day-care centres, workplaces and commercial buildings, prisons, markets and food establishments, transport centres and places of worship.

The key hygiene behaviours include handwashing with soap, safe drinking water management, faecal disposal, food hygiene, menstrual hygiene, and waste management.

In the case of health care centres, these need to have a safe and accessible water supply, clean and safe sanitation conveniences, hand hygiene amenities at points of care and toilets, appropriate waste disposal systems and environmental cleaning.

According to the strategy, infrastructure that supports hygiene and healthcare waste management practices helps prevent the spread of diseases within the health service facilities and in the surrounding community.
The strategy was developed with the support of UNICEF and WaterAid Southern Africa.

Maureen Nkandu, Regional Communications Manager for WaterAid Southern Africa, says the policy underlines the need for leadership, commitment, and accountability “to create a culture of hygienic behaviour and practices across all levels of society and to enable hygiene services, behaviour change and promote basic sanitation”.

“For these objectives to be effective, there will be a requirement for strong planning, financial resourcing, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation systems in each of the SADC countries,” Nkandu tells IPS.

She says WaterAid has rallied key partners, including WASH-oriented civil society and development agencies, to demand adequate resources to implement the strategy effectively.

Further, achieving sustainable hygiene behaviour across generations needs innovative behaviour change programmes of scale. This can be realised through adequate financing, coordination of relevant sectors and political leadership, Nkandu says.

For Malawi, the strategy presents an opportunity for the country to push harder towards attaining Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) targets related to hygiene, says Maziko Matemba, a community health ambassador appointed by the Ministry of Health.

Matemba corroborates Paulo’s experience, observing that many healthcare facilities in Malawi are a source of infection for patients, guardians, and visitors because of poor hygiene.

“Sanitation and hygiene in most of our public health facilities is a serious concern. People go to hospitals to get treated, but we have cases where patients and guardians have returned home with new health conditions contracted due to poor hygiene,” he says, citing washrooms as hotspots.

Matemba argues that healthcare facilities could promote good hygiene in Malawi and SADC.

“People gather in these facilities to seek services. That’s a huge advantage to drive home awareness messages and demonstrate by own standards how people can promote good hygiene in their homes,” says Matemba, who is also Executive Director for Health and Rights Education Programme (HREP), a local organisation.

But in all this, funding is a major factor, he observes.

“Hospital administrators tell us that if they have no money for a primary commodity like drugs, hence these perennial drug shortages we see, how can mops, handwashing materials and chemicals to clean toilets with become a priority?”

Matemba tells IPS that although civil society organisations have been campaigning for ages for the government to address the critical shortage of funding to hospitals, not much has changed.

“Development budget is always inadequate. Recurrent expenditures, already less than required, are further cut, and the little that remains hardly goes to the facilities in time. Treasury always says the resource envelope is limited,” says Matemba.

He says the strategy challenges Malawi as SADC Chair to lead the way for member states to improve the hygiene situation in the region by fixing their own.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Health, Adrian Chikumbe, tells IPS that the SADC strategy is an important approach in minimising transmission of infection in health facilities and communities.

According to Chikumbe, a recent assessment by the ministry reveals that almost a third of Malawi’s health care facilities lack running water and 80 percent of patient latrines had no associated hand washing facility.

The assessment also found that environmental cleanliness was generally below average, characterised by poor waste management practices.

He says most of the lower-level facilities in the country lack resources to maintain functional WASH infrastructure.

“The Government recognises that it cannot do everything alone. It, therefore, has plans to mobilise partner support led by district authorities to plan and prioritise water, sanitation and hygiene infrastructure in all health facilities,” he says.

There is a critical shortage of qualified healthcare staff in Malawi to deal with the growing mental health burden in the country. Credit: Charles Mpaka

By Charles Mpaka
Lilongwe, Malawi, Dec 13 2021 (IPS)

When a former deputy speaker of Parliament shot himself dead within the National Assembly buildings in Lilongwe in September 2021, it shook Malawi. It also turned attention to the mental health burden in the country.

Experts say that a sharp rise in suicide cases has become the most visible expression of the burden of mental health challenges in Malawi.

“There’s depression, stress and many other silent forms of disorders. More often, we act quickly on a mentally challenged person because he is causing havoc,” says Harry Kawiya, a psychiatric clinical officer at the Zomba Mental Hospital, Malawi’s only referral mental health facility and one of the two specialised institutions in the country. “But the rising of cases of suicides recently tells us the severity of the mental health problem among us, which we are not adequately addressing.”

National police records show that suicide cases have increased drastically in Malawi over the past three years. For instance, between January and March 2021, the country registered 76 suicides – an increase of nearly 50 percent over the same period last year.

One police station in Lilongwe registers an average of six cases every month, the station’s spokesperson, Foster Benjamin, tells IPS.

“This is a steep rise, and it’s worrying,” he says. “The reasons [why people are committing suicide] range from family disagreements to financial troubles. In almost all the cases, those that kill themselves are men.”

The former deputy speaker, Clement Chiwaya, 50, left a suicide note detailing frustrations with sorting out benefits, including an official vehicle which he had bought, as the reason.

In a village just outside Lilongwe, a man hanged himself around last year due to debts related to his small-scale tobacco farm.

His wife, Christina Makwecha, says she lost her 43-year-old husband in October 2020 after the tobacco marketing season had just closed.

“We made heavy losses such that we could not pay some of the debts for labourers and the inputs we got from agro-dealers,” says Makwecha, a mother of four children.

One evening on her return from a village savings group meeting in the area, she found the man hanging in a tree in a field not too far from their home.

“It was then that I remembered that for almost two weeks before the incident, he had become increasingly restless, unusually angry and started skipping meals,” she says.

While the country is registering a rising number of suicides, many Malawians lack the awareness of mental health disorders that lead to people killing themselves, says Dr Charles Masulani, Chief Executive Officer of the St John of God Hospitaller Services Ltd, a Catholic Church mental health hospital in Malawi.

“Just as people would know where to go when they have malaria because there is a lot of knowledge about malaria, we do not know about mental health disorders in Malawi. So, people tend to struggle within themselves without seeking help from counsellors, faith leaders or therapists, or any other who would offer help,” Masulani says.

Records at the hospital show that it registered 7,671 mental health patient consultations last year – including 4,142 men and 3,529 women.

The mental health disorders diagnosed included anxiety, bipolar disorder, psychosis, dementia, delusional disorder, depression, delirium, epilepsy, hippomania, antisocial personality disorder, learning disability and schizophrenia.

Experts say that the COVID-19 impact on businesses has worsened the high prevalence of mental health disorders in Malawi, and the government’s response has been falling short.

In 2017, the Office of Ombudsman investigation found glaring deficiencies in mental health management in the public health system.

It faulted the government for failing to fund district health offices adequately for them to be able to handle patients before sending them to the referral hospital.

The Ombudsman also blamed the Ministry of Health for the persistent acute shortage of psychiatric staff, which compromised the quality of care for patients with mental disorders.

The inquiry established, for instance, that in two districts in the central region, the mental healthcare worker to population ratio ranged between 1:80,840 and 1:558,470.

According to the report, the problem of staff shortage starts with how the training for doctors in Malawi is designed.

“Whilst the undergraduates are exposed to the different aspects of the medical profession including psychiatry, during the internship psychiatry is completely shunned thereby further depriving [the system of] additional and potential psychiatric staff,” reads the report.

The investigation further exposed inefficiencies in the procurement of psychotropic drugs for patients with mental disorders, leading to their unavailability most of the time.

Four years after the investigation, these challenges remain.

During the commemoration of World Mental Health Day in October, Dr Michael Udedi, a mental health expert in the Ministry of Health, admitted the critical shortage of specialised personnel in the public health system.

He said while the country does have some mental health clinicians and nurses in almost every district hospital of the country, there is only one psychiatrist based at Zomba Mental Hospital and no psychologist in public hospitals.

He also disclosed that in May this year, the Ministry of Health advertised vacancies to recruit psychologists; there was no response.

In addition, there is no dedicated budget for mental health, Udedi told IPS in an interview last week.

“Therefore, it is not easy to track the funding for mental health per se,” he says.

He, however, says the ministry does disburse some funding to the referral hospital. He also says it falls on district health offices to dedicate part of their funding from treasury towards mental health activities such as drug procurement.

In her report, the Ombudsman attributed the apparent lack of attention to mental health as a primary healthcare problem to a weak and old legislative framework.

The treatment of patients with mental disorders is catered for in the Mental Health Act passed in 1948 – when Malawi was still under British colonial rule.

“This law is out of touch with the current trends in mental health service delivery,” reads the report.

In 2000, Malawi developed its first National Mental Health Policy. But this too has had no significant impact on mental health service delivery. The policy has, thus, been under review.

Now the government hopes that the challenges in the sector will be addressed once a bill, currently being drafted, is tabled, and passed in Parliament, possibly in February next year.

The Mental Health Bill has a provision for ring-fenced mental health funding. According to Udedi, this is key to addressing most of the challenges in mental health.

“This will see to it that mental health is adequately funded. This would have an implication on human resources for mental health, that’s including support in training,” he says.

But Udedi also challenges communities to play their part in raising awareness, minimising stigma and discrimination towards people with mental health problems and linking such people with service providers for assistance.

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A maise farmer in her fields last year. This year small-scale farmers are anxiously waiting for an impasse between government and private traders to be resolved so they can get their subsidised fertiliser. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By Charles Mpaka
BLANTYRE, Malawi, Nov 29 2021 (IPS)

Ellena Joseph, a small-scale maize farmer in Chiradzulu District in Southern Malawi, finished preparing her field early in October.

As the first rains start falling in some parts of the country, her anxiety is growing because she is yet to purchase fertiliser because she does not have any money.

Joseph, 63, is one of the 3.7 million farmers the government targets to benefit under the 2021 Agricultural Input Programme (AIP).

In this programme, the government subsidises fertiliser and seeds for small-scale producers who make up more than 80 percent of farmers in Malawi.

The programme has been running since 2005, and every year, it is saddled with challenges – like corruption, non-availability of goods at sales points and delivery hitches.

This year, these challenges are compounded by a rise in prices of fertiliser which shot up by nearly 100 percent.

The impact of the increase has trickled down to the farmers. For every $23 in government subsidies for a 50kg bag of fertiliser, the farmers are contributing about $9. Last year they paid $5.4.

And Joseph is feeling the weight of that rise on her shoulders. First, she needs money to redeem her two bags of fertiliser.

Then, because chaos is the norm at the agro-dealer shop in her area, she has to bribe the clerks or pay some youths to stand in the queue on her behalf. The more the days and nights they stand in the line for her, the more the money she needs to fork out.

Once she buys the fertiliser, she will have to hire a motorbike to transport the commodity to her home, some 17km away.

In total, she needs at least $28 to meet these expenses.

“I don’t have that kind of money, and I don’t know where to get it from,” she tells IPS. “I hope by the time the fertiliser comes, I will have found the money.”

In the previous years, she relied on the government-funded public works programme to earn a small wage. For the past two years, there haven’t been any projects in her area.

Amid the perennial challenges rocking the food subsidy programme intended to ensure food security in Malawi, the rise in fertiliser prices has been the most dramatic.

It all began in June, soon after Parliament passed the national budget in which the government allocated $172,000 towards the programme, targeting 3.7 million farmers – the same number as last year.

Following the hike in price on the global market, the cost of fertiliser increased in the country. Malawi was hit hard. It relies on imports because it does not have a fertiliser manufacturing plant.

In reaction, the Ministry of Agriculture, the implementing agency of the flagship food security programme, announced it would trim the number of beneficiaries.

“Due to financial constraints and the rising prices of fertiliser, the ministry, after looking into these two compound challenges, has decided to have AIP beneficiaries scaled down. It is therefore very necessary that the scaling down of the beneficiaries be done up to village level,” said the ministry’s secretary Sandram Maweru in a circular dated July 21, 2021 and addressed to all 28 district commissioners.

The ministry recommended specific figures from every district, resulting in fewer beneficiaries totalling 2.7 million.

But a week after the district commissioner had submitted the revised data to the ministry, on August 21, President Lazarus Chakwera overturned the decision of his agriculture officials. He directed that no one who was on the list last year could be taken off.

“I will not allow anyone to remove any family or village from the list of beneficiaries,” he said.

And so began a tug of war between the government and private traders.

While the private traders insisted they would need to sell the fertiliser at the new prices, which would have outstripped the budget allocated, the government accused the private traders of inflating the prices to sabotage the programme.

It told them it would buy their fertiliser for AIP at $29 per 50kg bag instead of the $43.6 per 50 kg which the private traders had set for it.

Efforts to resolve the standoff did not yield results. Last week, 13 of the 164 traders the government had engaged had not signed contracts to supply the fertiliser. This amounts to close to a million bags of fertiliser.

In a statement in Parliament on November 18, Minister of Agriculture Lobin Lowe insisted it was up to the traders to take it or leave it while admitting that only 10 percent of the targeted 371,000 metric tonnes had been procured.

The private traders account for 66 percent of the commodity, while two public agencies supply 34 percent for the programme.

However, the fact that 151 traders have signed the contract does not guarantee that the fertiliser will be supplied, indicates Mbawaka Phiri, Executive Administration Officer for the Fertiliser Association of Malawi, a grouping of the private traders.

“Caution must be taken to not assume that all 151 traders have stock and can supply. Many of those who have signed contracts are still having difficulty procuring stock,” she says.

According to Phiri, some private traders have decided not to participate in the programme this year because the AIP fertiliser price is too low to do business.

Traders are not obliged to sign the government’s contract offer – that is a business decision.

“However, it is also up to the government to decide whether the programme can be successful without the participation of suppliers from the private sector. Last year’s programme was successful mainly due to the participation of private suppliers who were able to deliver larger amounts of fertiliser in a very short period and to all areas of the country,” she says.

Agriculture policy expert, Tamani Nkhono-Mvula, says in general, the implementation of the programme this year has not been satisfactory.

“This is November, and we have less than 10 percent of the fertiliser supplied when we were supposed to have at least 50 percent of the farmers reached by mid-October. Once rains start in a matter of weeks, that will compound the logistical challenges we already have,” he says.

He says the programme is crucial because it targets low-income farmers who cannot afford the farm inputs, but its management is concerning.

“It seems the programme has become a way for some people to make money. They would love to see chaos in the programme because that is the way they are able to benefit,” says Nkhono-Mvula.

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A group of youths engaged in various activities in Machinga, Malawi, to prevent and help in fighting trafficking of children from the area to Mozambique. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By Charles Mpaka
BLANTYRE, Malawi, Oct 6 2020 (IPS)

In August, police intercepted the trafficking of 31 people to Mozambique. The victims, all Malawians, included 17 children and 6 women. Their two traffickers, also Malawians, had coerced them from their rural village in Lilongwe district with a promise of jobs in estates in neighbouring Mozambique. But they were saved in large part thanks to their own community.

According to Malawian police, they incepted the trafficking after a tip-off from members of the community. This, the police say, is one of the fruits of using community policing to fight crime in Malawi. National spokesperson for the Malawi Police Service, Assistant Superintendent James Kadadzera, says the police owe many of their crackdowns on trafficking to the community policing system.

In Malawi, community policing is not vigilantism. It is a system where the police organise voluntary members of the community to form groups to detect crime and alert police for action.

“They are our eyes in places we are not present. They complement the efforts of our detectives. They sensitise fellow community members on safety and security issues,” Kadadzera tells IPS.

The Trafficking in Persons Act of 2015 provides for increased participation of individuals, institutions and communities in preventing human trafficking.

Involving communities in anti-human trafficking efforts means the crime can be tackled at its source and that trafficking transit routes are shut down.

However, after years of campaigning and a raft of frameworks and initiatives such as community policing, Malawi still ranks high as a source, destination and transit country for human trafficking.

A 2020 Trafficking in Persons Report for Malawi by the United States’ Department of State recognises Malawi’s “significant efforts” to combat human trafficking. But it says Malawi “does not fully meet the minimum standards for elimination of trafficking”.

The report highlights the case of Nepali women who were trafficked into Malawi last year, which  illustrates the fraudulent white-collar practices that are aiding trafficking here.

According to the report, there are credible reports of official complicity by police and immigration officials in the trafficking of the women into Malawi.

Even worse, the government transferred the whistleblower in the case, reportedly to prevent him from further investigating the crime and exposing the officials involved.

“In two sensitive cases,” says the report, “judges granted traffickers bail, and, in one case, there were credible reports that the trafficker continued to recruit women for labour trafficking in the Middle East while awaiting trial.”

McBain Mkandawire is executive director for Youth Net and Counselling (YONECO), which works with youth who are prime targets for traffickers for labour and prostitution purposes.

He says Malawi is struggling to combat human trafficking because of “a combination of the complicity of government officials and the rich at the top and high poverty levels at the bottom”.   

Human trafficking is a lucrative business for the rich and the powerful, Mkandawire says.

“This is a big money industry. High profile people facilitate it in one way or another. They finance it and frustrate justice because they profit from the misery of the poor,” Mkandawire tells IPS.

For example, he says, the estates where these people are trafficked to are not owned by poor people.

“Those estates are owned by the rich and the powerful. They know how their labourers are recruited. They facilitate the crime because they are profiting from the poor through cheap labour and poor working conditions. And they will do anything to frustrate efforts to eradicate human trafficking,” Mkandawire says.

He adds that through his organisation’s work on youth programmes around the country, apart from the public ignorance on how human trafficking works, high levels of poverty make Malawians easy prey for traffickers who lure them with false promises of better lives elsewhere.

In Machinga district in southern Malawi, child trafficking is one of major concerns for the community-based Youth Response for Social Change (YRSC). The youth organisation is located in a rural town in Machinga district on the border between Malawi and Mozambique. The remote town is the exit point out of Malawi via the main railway line to Nacala Port in Mozambique. 

Here, together with traditional leaders and the police, YRSC battles the trafficking of Malawian children to work in tobacco estates in Mozambique. Executive director for YRSC Lamecks Kiyare tells IPS the problem worsens during the months of August to November when the farming season begins in Mozambique.

He admits they face daunting challenges.

“It’s not easy. We face a barrage of challenges such as poor stakeholder coordination, lack of political will among community leaders and no financial resources to support the repatriated children,” Kiyare tells IPS.

According to Maxwell Matewere, the national project officer in the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) in Malawi, combating trafficking remains a pipe dream as long as Malawi does not address the underlying causes.

“The problem continues due to lack of strategies to deal with the root causes of trafficking in persons. We cannot successfully fight trafficking in persons unless the country deals with poverty, unemployment and public ignorance on human trafficking,” Matewere tells IPS.

Matewere says while the police have demonstrated some positive responses in arresting offenders of human trafficking and taking them to court for prosecution, the courts themselves are not swift and bold in handling trafficking cases.

“The lower courts continue to apply the law with kindness and favour on the offenders. We are registering increasing number of cases whose convicts have received suspended sentences other than imprisonment. No one can learn anything,” he says.

YONECO has its own experience with the courts. It has been pursuing the trafficking of a young woman to a hospitality facility within Malawi. 

The suspects first appeared court in February 2019 but to date the magistrate is yet to set a date for trial. 

“We are not told the reasons for this lack of progress. Meanwhile, the trafficker is on bail, roaming around, perhaps trafficking more people in his freedom,” says Mkandawire of YONECO.

The Registrar of the High Court and Supreme Court of Appeal, Agness Patemba, did not respond to IPS’ questions regarding complaints about the courts’ handling of human trafficking cases. 

However, issues of frustration over the delivery of justice in general by Malawi’s court system are well known. The Judiciary itself admits this in its Strategic Plan (2019-2024). It highlights poor work ethics among judicial officers and members of staff, corruption and delayed judgements among the threats to justice delivery.

But perhaps a more stirring and direct expose of the malpractices in the fraternity has come from the judiciary’s own senior judge, Esmie Chombo. In January 2018, the High Court Judge and Judge President for the Lilongwe Registry wrote a strong letter to the Malawi Law Society, outlining abuses of court processes by lawyers.    

Chombo accused lawyers of “judge shopping” and frequenting court premises at night to execute corruption schemes.

She further accused them of bribing court clerks to prioritise their work and remove from court files documents from opposing parties in order to mislead the court. There were also accused of bribing clerks to misplace or destroy case files in order to frustrate court proceedings.

She therefore called on judges and the lawyers’ body to swiftly uproot “these obnoxious practices before they take deep roots”.

Mkandawire says challenges of this kind are endemic and entrenched in the levels that hold the key to ending injustices in Malawi.

He says communities and other low-level groups can do their part. But official collusion makes Malawi’s fight against human trafficking a complex task.

“Until we get rid of corruption at every level and in every place, until we comprehensively tackle the root causes of human trafficking, this crime will remain a serious problem for us for a long time,” he tells IPS.

This is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.

The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalisation of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

The rural-urban migration of youth household members is leading to loss of labour for agricultural production which was not compensated by hired labour. Courtesy: Charles Mpaka

By Charles Mpaka
CHIRADZULU DISTRICT/BLANTYRE, Malawi, Aug 12 2020 (IPS)

As households in Chiradzulu District in Southern Malawi start preparing their farms for the next maize growing season, Frederick Yohane, 24, is a busy young man.

Every morning, he works with his two brothers in their family field where they grow maize and pigeon peas. In the afternoon, he tills other people’s farms to raise money for his needs and to support his family.

Twice a week he cycles to nearby markets to sell the chickens that he buys from surrounding villages.

This has been his life since he was 16 when his father suffered a stroke, which paralysed his left leg and arm. Yohane finished secondary school in 2014, two years after his father fell ill. But he did not pass the final examinations.

Without a school-leaving certificate, he followed the route of many youths in this rural district who trek to Blantyre, Malawi’s commercial capital, to look for menial jobs, mainly as assistants in Asian shops or as street vendors.

“Through a friend, I found work in a hardware shop owned by an Indian. But the money was not good compared with what I was getting in the village. So, I just worked for two months and I returned to the village,” he tells IPS.

Yohane is not planning to return to town again to look for a job. He believes he can make more money in the village if he works harder.

“Besides, I am the eldest child. My father can no longer work. My mother spends much of her time looking after our father. It’s the three of us working in the field,” he says.

Yohane’s family is one of the millions in Malawi which relies on family labour for their farms.  The Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) says in its Small Family Farms Country Factsheet for Malawi that farmers account for 80 percent of the total population of 17.5 million in Malawi. Out of that population of farmers, around 75 percent are small family farms that depend on family labour.

However, like the rest of Africa, Malawi suffers a high rate of rural-urban migration, mostly by youths seeking a better life in towns.

When youths, who make up the majority of Malawi’s population, migrate to urban centres, the productivity of family labour farms declines, according to findings of a study commissioned by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Malawi in 2018 under its Enhancing Capacity to Apply Research Evidence (CARE) in Policy for Youth Engagement in Agribusiness and Rural Economic Activities in Africa.

Under the CARE programme, IITA is working with young researchers across Africa to promote understanding of the impact of poverty reduction and employment and factors that influence youth engagement in agribusiness and rural farm and non-farm economy, Timilehin Osunde, communications officer for the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)-CARE Project at the IITA in Nigeria, tells IPS.

In the Malawi CARE study, researcher Emmanuel Tolani interviewed households in two districts of Zomba and Lilongwe. Both districts are known for their high production of maize, Malawi’s staple crop.

The CARE study focused on households where youth had migrated to urban centres in comparison with those where youths had not moved.                  

In a resulting Policy Brief titled “Youth on the Move: Welfare effects on originating households”, the research found that households, which have youths migrating to urban centres, were each producing 13 50-kilogramme bags less than they could harvest if the youth did not move out.

“This can be [attributed] to the fact that migration of youth household members was leading to loss of labour for agricultural production which was not compensated by hired labour using the remittances received,” reads the brief.

In the brief, Tolani recommends the introduction of income-generating activities among rural households to reduce the need for households to look for other means of diversifying their incomes, such as encouraging the migration of youths.

IITA’s Osunde adds that the lack of an environment suitable for agribusiness, the search for educational opportunities and access to services and resources are among the factors for the trend of rural youths leaving their homes for urban centres in Africa.

Over the years, Malawi has designed and implemented programmes aimed at improving social and economic conditions of rural areas, which could reduce rural-urban migration in Malawi.

However, rural-urban migration has not abated. Malawi’s National Planning Commission attributes this to what it says are “policy implementation inconsistencies across political regimes”.

This argument has featured highly in development discourse in Malawi such that it motivated the establishment of the National Planning Commission. Established through an Act of Parliament in 2017, the Commission’s mandate is to ensure continuity of development policies across political administrations.

On the other hand, Osunde observes that a lot of rural development programmes in Africa have failed because they are designed by policy makers without the input of the rural youth.

“These are often implemented with an up-bottom approach instead of using a bottom-up approach,” Osunde tells IPS.

To support African governments in stemming the tide of youth rural-urban migration, IITA is implementing a number of agriculture-specific programmes, besides CARE.

For instance, the Start Them Early Programme (STEP) aims at changing the mindset of young people in primary and secondary schools by providing them with basic understanding in agriculture to direct them toward agriculture-related careers, says Osunde.

IITA is also implementing Enable Youth project. This provides opportunities for underemployed young people, motivating them to establish agricultural enterprises and improve their agribusiness skills.

“[The programme] helps to create a conducive business environment by advancing youth-led policies and provides a communication network that delivers much-needed agricultural information to other youths involved in agribusiness,” Osunde says. 

In addition, the IITA Youth Agripreneurs aims to change perceptions of youths in Africa about agriculture and see that agriculture can be exciting and economically rewarding.

“With agriculture in Africa largely suffering from negative perceptions amongst youths due to the drudgery involved, insufficient financial gains and a dearth in basic infrastructure, the youth programme being implemented by IITA is aimed at changing the perception among youths in Africa while creating resources that can enable them start out as agripreneurs on the continent. These are agriculture-specific programmes that Malawi can adopt to attract youths into agribusiness,” Osunde tells IPS.

Director General for the National Planning Commission, Dr Thomas Munthali, says they are currently mapping the country into potential investment zones with bankable investment projects which, among others, could lead to the reduction of youth migration.

“The idea is to create secondary cities in such zones based on their arable land, mining and tourism potential. These will be created into industrial hubs offering sustainable decent jobs and socio-economic amenities just like in cities,” says Munthali.

As rural youths in Malawi wait for such programmes, Yohane has already decided to stay in the village. And he is dreaming big.

“We harvest enough maize for our food. But we need to make money. So we are planning to rent another piece of land this year where we can grow more maize for sale. We won’t need hired labour. In future, we want to see if we can buy more land on which we can do serious commercial farming,” he says. 

By Charles Mpaka and - -
BLANTYRE, Nov 14 2011 (IPS)

In just a few weeks, seven villages that had expected to remain “in the dark forever” will finally have electricity, courtesy of a small hydroelectric power plant on Lichenya River, one of the major rivers on the eastern slopes of Mulanje Mountain in southern Malawi.

The Mulanje Renewable Energy Agency (MuREA), a non-governmental organisation that provides access to modern and renewable forms of energy in rural areas, is constructing the micro hydroelectric power station, which will come online in early December.

Isolated in the Mulanje Mountain, Malawi’s highest at 3,000 metres above sea level, the district of Bondo is difficult to access even though it lies 22 kilometres from the Mulanje district through where the national grid of the state-run Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi (Escom) passes.

However, Escom believes that it is not economically viable to provide electricity to this hard to reach mountainous area with an estimated population of only 13,000 people.

“We have grown up here knowing that we will live in the dark forever. We are away from everyone, including Escom. We could not dream of having electricity in our homes. But this project is about to turn our area into a small rural town in the mountain and we are excited,” says Levison Robert, the headman for Kalamwa Village, one of the seven villages in Bondo to benefit from the project.

At least 250 litres of water per second will be diverted into a 620-metre-long canal, which will descend 300 metres through sluices to a power house located on the lower riverbank.

“The project will not affect water levels in the river as most of the water we are diverting will be released back into the river straight from the power house,” explains MuREA project coordinator Vincent Gondwe.

Feasibility studies have shown that at its lowest point, the river generates up to 300 cubic metres of water per second.

The new hydroelectric power station will generate about 75 kilowatts of electricity. According to engineer Horace Lumby, this will supply electricity to the 3,084 households in Bondo’s seven villages, a primary and secondary school, a clinic, and two small business centres, which are to be built as part of the project.

The hydroelectric power station is also expected to unlock the area’s economic potential. It is Malawi’s largest tea- and fruit-growing district and people in Bondo earn a living growing and selling pineapples, mangoes and bananas. They also grow tea on a small scale, which they sell to the larger tea estates.

Electricity will provide them with more business opportunities, Robert says.

“We grow a lot of pineapples, mangoes and bananas here but we sell them cheaply for fear that they will go to waste if we keep them too long. We believe electricity will give us a chance to add value to some of our fruits and we will be able to keep them longer and sell when prices are right,” says Robert.

With 425,000 dollars in funding from the European Union, the project is being implemented with the help of the community. Locals have provided labour to engineers and have been engaged in digging the canal and sourcing sand to be used in construction.

Esnat Godfrey, a small grocery shop owner in Kalamwa II Village, says local women are helping with the project because once the plant is operational, it will save them from walking long distances to the nearest electricity-driven maize mill. A maize mill will be established at one of the two business centres that are yet to be built, says Gondwe.

“We’re lucky we have a big river, so we’re providing all the help the engineers need for the plant. Electricity will save us from the torture of walking seven kilometres to our nearest maize mill, where we spend the whole day when there is a black out,” Godfrey says.

MuREA will charge for the electricity the power station generates and is forming an independent body whose task will be to collect revenue and work with the community to manage the project.

Malawi’s energy act allows private sector participation in the supply of electricity but limits these suppliers to rates no higher than Escom’s.

“We will be using the money that the independent body will be collecting for other renewable energy exploration and development programmes,” Gondwe says.

The Bondo Micro Hydro project has the technical support of the Ministry of Natural Resources, Energy and Environment, Escom and the Malawi Energy Regulatory Authority.

Escom is currently in the sixth phase of the Malawi Rural Electrification Programme (MAREP), under which 53 rural trading centres have received electricity since 2004.

However, according to an Escom official privy to the conditions considered when deciding on the centres to be provided with electricity, Bondo was not included because it is not economically viable.

“It has a small population, it’s hard to reach and there isn’t much business activity there for Escom to receive a good revenue from electricity usage. That area is unlikely to fall on MAREP’s list. So the MuREA plant is some redemption for them…More importantly, it’s an illustration of how the electricity supply can be improved in Malawi,” the official says.

Various studies, including one by the Japan International Cooperation Agency, have identified more than a dozen potential hydroelectric power plant sites on Malawi’s many rivers and the government says it will exploit these sites to increase Escom’s power capacity.

Government is yet to do this, however, as it continues investing in rehabilitating Escom’s power stations on the Shire River.

Power outages are a perennial problem in Malawi, sometimes lasting as long as 17 hours, and are often attributed to Escom’s aged machinery. The corporation has a total capacity of about 300 megawatts, 90 percent of which comes from hydroelectric power, with the remainder coming from thermal plants.

Against an annual customer growth averaging 8.5 percent, Escom is struggling to meet the increasing demand for electricity. Less than two percent of the 13 million people in this small country in southern Africa have electricity, Escom’s records show.

Excerpt:

By Charles Mpaka
BLANTYRE, Aug 17 2011 (IPS)

Two battered plastic chairs bar entry to the toilets at the Bangwe Township Clinic in Blantyre. The toilets are not working because there is no running water – yet again. And if patients want to use the facilities they will have to run to the next- door primary school, which has pit latrines.

Women return from fetching water after the supply in their homes was cut off during the water rationing. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

But the clinic, which sees an average of 100 patients daily, needs water for its patients and the nurse draws two buckets a day from the borehole at a nearby mosque.

“We just get a couple of buckets from there so that our patients can have some water to drink or use to take (their) medication. We are affected by this water shortage. My job is not to go looking for water, but to examine and prescribe medicine for my patients,” says the nurse at the clinic.

The rainy season ended in March in Malawi. It is currently the dry season but this year there are much lower water volumes. It has led the state-run Blantyre Water Board to begin rationing water. The board admits, however, that the current demand for water in the city far exceeds the capacity to supply it.

Dogged by persistent power outages at its main water intake, which is over 50 kilometres away from Blantyre, and a collapsing system that has not been rehabilitated in over 40 years, the board is struggling to meet increasing water demands.

The population in Blantyre has grown from 113,000 in 1966 to 670,000 in 2008, according to the National Statistical Office.

However, there is a five million dollar project currently underway to improve the southern African country’s water infrastructure by 2013.

The Blantyre Water Board says the project will improve the water supply from 78,000 cubic metres per day to 96,000 cubic metres per day. This would enable the board to end the perennial water shortages and reach over one million people.

Meanwhile, in townships across the city the sight of residents queuing for water at the few functioning water points is a common sight. Some even use city streams for washing clothes or bathing.

Hospitals too are not spared. The Blantyre Adventist Hospital, one of Malawi’s major private hospitals, did not have water for a week.

Chief executive officer for the hospital, Kirby Kasinja, told local media that the water shortage has been a persistent problem at the facility. There have been brief lapses in the water supply during the past few months, but the water stopped completely last week, crippling the hospital’s operations.

“We have dirty linen from the theatre that are soiled and bloodied and we need to wash them. (But) how can we wash them when we are regularly without water? Even patients are supposed to be clean as a matter of hygiene, but there is no water for (bathing) as well,” he said.

Desperate to keep things running in its theatres, maternity wards and other critical departments, the hospital spends about 400 dollars daily to hire private water tankers to meet some of its water needs. But Kasinja says this expense is too costly for the hospital.

Spokesperson for the Blantyre Water Board, Innocent Mbvundula, denies that hospitals have been forced to ration. They are priority facilities, he says, and their water supply will not be cut.

“We do not cut (the water supply to) hospitals because they are critical facilities,” he says, attributing some of the water shortages experienced by hospitals to technical problems. He assured IPS that the board investigates and solves these supply issues as soon as they are altered to them.

Maziko Matemba, director of the Health and Rights Education Programme, a health civil society organisation, says water shortages in the city have far-reaching implications on the health of residents and patients in hospitals.

He says patients need water, especially for personal hygiene. “(To implement) disease prevention (you) need water at all the times because an unhygienic environment is a breeding ground for many infectious diseases. … These water shortages will create a health crisis,” Matemba says.

He urges the Blantyre Water Board to prioritise water supply to hospitals and to carry out orientation programmes on the proper utilisation of water in hospitals, homes and public places to ease the pressure on the overstretched water distribution network.

Until then, residents and essential facilities in the city will have to find alternative sources.

As for the Bangwe Township Clinic, there isn’t much staff there can do. When the borehole at the mosque breaks down, the clinic goes without water.

“It’s a bit tolerable for us only because we are an outpatient hospital. But the problem is persistent. You never know, one day we may have to start asking patients to bring water in bottles so they can drink while they wait for medical attention,” says the nurse.

Excerpt:

By Charles Mpaka
BLANTYRE, Aug 2 2011 (IPS)

When the original owners of a 3.5 hectare piece of land put it up for sale because it was too waterlogged to farm on, Diana Sitima and her husband, Wilson, jumped to buy it.

Wilson Sitima quit his banking job so he and his wife, Diana, could concentrate on farming. Credit: Charles Mpaka

Now their small farm is an outstanding example of integrated farming, which combines animal and crop production with the two enterprises depending on each other for their growth. At the heart of that growth is water.

Located about 15 kilometres outside Blantyre in the district of Chiradzulu in southern Malawi, the farm is a moist field of bananas, sugarcane, and a variety of vegetables. There are four dams stocked with fish, two dairy cows, pigs, goats and poultry.

The farm is designed so that the animals feed on the crops grown on it and in turn the animal manure is used to fertilise the crops. The dams supply water for irrigation.

The success of the farm has attracted agricultural experts, top government officials and even cabinet ministers who visit the farm to admire its productivity.

The farm generates about 700 dollars a week from the sale of produce and livestock – an income 100 times higher than what half of the people in Malawi scrape by on, according to figures from the ministry of finance.

The Sitimas also employ 10 permanent workers, while dozens more work on a temporary basis throughout the year. The farm is now a viable business and the husband and wife team have been able to get bank loans to invest further in it.

The family attributes their success to the abundance and good management of water on the plot they bought in 1994 for less than 15 dollars.

“The owners sold it to us in a way of throwing it away because it was too water logged and they didn’t know how to work it. But we knew water is life, and with good management we would make the most of this piece of land,” says Wilson Sitima.

Morris Salifu, an agricultural extension worker the Sitimas consulted for advice, helped them design the integrated farming system they currently use and advised them to dig four dams on the site to reduce the surface water saturation and make the land cultivable.

The dams also harvest water when it rains, so throughout the year there is water for irrigation.

This small landlocked southern African nation has numerous water resources comprising three inland lakes, over 13 perennial rivers and scores of wetlands. In addition to widespread ground water sources, the water system in Malawi covers over 21 percent of the country’s territorial area, according to the national water policy.

However, the policy states that the country’s water resources have not been “adequately and strategically managed” through irrigated agriculture for the realisation of maximum social and economic benefits.

Records from the ministry of agriculture show that in 2009/2010 Malawi produced 3.5 million tonnes of maize, the country’s staple crop. This was one million tonnes more than the national food requirements. Of the total harvest, only 300,000 tonnes came from irrigation farming.

Land shortage was also listed as among the major factors leading to low agricultural productivity in Malawi. The national land policy says land holding sizes in Malawi have shrunk from 1.53 hectares in 1968 to 0.8 hectares in 2000 and 0.2 hectares in 2008 due to an increasing population.

After adjusting for wetlands, steep slopes and traditionally protected areas, only 4.5 million hectares of land is available for small scale farmers who account for about 80 percent of the country’s total agricultural production.

Government has called for productive farm practices on the small pieces of land available as many Malawians risk sliding further into poverty. And the Sitimas’ way of farming could be a solution for many small scale farmers.

“We can’t keep complaining about small land sizes because we may never get larger pieces of land. So, what we have been doing on this farm is to ask the experts about how we can make the most of our land,” says Diana Sitima.

Noting the potential of the farm early on, Wilson Sitima quit a well-paying job with one of the top banks in Malawi and Diana Sitima resigned from a sales executive position so they could concentrate on farming.

National coordinator for the Civil Society Agriculture Network, Tamani Nkhono-Mvula, says integrated agriculture has the potential to maximise productivity in small scale agriculture, especially on water- logged sites and near permanent water sources. The system is self-sustaining, he says, because it thrives on the interdependence of enterprises.

However, Nkhono thinks not many small scale farmers in Malawi would be enthusiastic about adopting commercial integrated agriculture because they are afraid to take risks.

“Most small scale farmers in Malawi don’t want to take (on) challenges. They would rather do things the old way and that is not quite helpful, especially as farm land sizes keep shrinking,” he says.

The Sitimas did not start with much money; their capital was the water on the site, good advice and hard work, they say.

“If there was no water, this place would have been dead. Water is fuelling the integration here and without it, we would not have purchased this land,” says Wilson Sitima.  

Excerpt:

By Charles Mpaka
BLANTYRE, Jul 21 2011 (IPS)

In light of the recent spate of protests in Malawi, government should rethink its policy to devalue the local currency, economists say.

Persistent fuel shortages ignited violent nationwide public protests in Malawi as protestors called for President Bingu wa Mutharika's resignation. Credit: Charles Mpaka

People looted shops and torched property in running battles with police across the country. Looting continued in some parts of Lilongwe and Blantyre on Thursday morning and security vehicles were seen patrolling the streets as the army had been called out to quell the violence.

Over the past two years, Malawi has experienced sporadic fuel shortages. The fuel scarcity has been particularly persistent since January, resulting in long queues and motorists waiting overnight at filling stations for fuel. Commentators have blamed the shortage on government’s failure to contain the forex scarcity and not having enough forex with which to purchase fuel.

On Jul. 20 Mutharika blamed the fuel problem and forex shortage partly on International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies.

The IMF and local economic experts have also repeatedly called on government to devalue the Malawi kwacha to generate forex, but government has refused.

“I cannot devalue the kwacha because no one, including the IMF, is giving me convincing arguments on what will be done to deal with the rise of the cost of living that will follow the devaluation,” Mutharika said.

But Richard Chiputula, an analyst at the economic policy think-tank Malawi Economic Justice Network differed with government.

“That devaluation can cause inflation is true, but I would favour the inflation that comes about because of devaluation because there will be production. In the current scenario, inflation will be because of lack of commodities because we don’t have forex to produce which, in my view, is dangerous,” he said.

Mutharika said because of IMF policies, government handed over the importation and distribution of fuel to the private sector. According to Mutharika, private fuel companies are more interested in maximising profits than ensuring a consistent supply of fuel.

Government is in the process of establishing a national oil company that will take charge of purchasing fuel and has contracted an international firm to construct storage facilities that are expected to be ready within the next six months.

Mutharika said the fuel shortage was because of the “tremendous economic developments” that Malawi is experiencing in construction, manufacturing and agriculture, which lead to high fuel consumption.

Mutharika also denied that the forex shortage was because of government’s fixing the exchange rate.

“At the insistence of the IMF, government is not managing forex. That is in the hands of the private sector and they stow it away in foreign banks,” he said.

Mutharika announced that all forex will now be managed by the Reserve Bank. He also said all commercial banks in Malawi will be required to submit monthly reports on how much forex they handle to government.

Chiputula supported government’s plan to regulate the flow of forex so that it does not leak onto the black market.

In a public address on Thursday, Mutharika condemned the violence and invited demonstrators to a dialogue. “I would like to invite those demonstrating to meet me so we can discuss solutions to the problems the country is facing. Violence will affect development,” he said in a lunch-hour address.

Civil society organisations under the Human Rights Consultative Committee also condemned the violence in a statement released Thursday and have called on the police to act. But there was no immediate commitment as to whether they will meet the president.

“He (Mutharika) has made some misjudgments recently but it is the fuel crisis that has led to this explosion,” said a protestor in Blantyre, Malawi’s commercial city.

Ahead of the demonstrations, civil society organisations indicated that the march would be peaceful.

However, groups of government sympathisers threatened to “meet protestors in the streets.” And on Tuesday, vehicles carrying panga-wielding youths who support Mutharika’s Democratic Progressive Party were seen in Blantyre. They threatened “to deal with” anyone demonstrating against government.

On Tuesday, government approved the march but by evening some government sympathisers obtained a court order to stop the protest. The march organisers went to court to have the injunction overturned and on Wednesday morning tempers flared among the crowds that had gathered in Blantyre, Lilongwe and Mzuzu, in northern Malawi.

There were riots in all the major cities, with the worst violence taking place in Lilongwe and in Mzuzu. Several vehicles belonging to Mutharika’s Democratic Progressive Party were torched and five people were reported dead.

The protesters have asked government to address the acute forex and fuel shortages, corruption and improve on respect of rule of law, among other things.

The protests come as Britain announced last week that it has suspended 35 million dollars worth of budget support to Malawi, raising fears of hardship for ordinary Malawians. Relations between the two nations have soured after Malawi expelled the British envoy after he allegedly accused Mutharika of becoming increasingly autocratic and failing on governance.

Germany has also suspended part of its aid to Malawi. Meanwhile, this year government introduced a zero-deficit budget, where all recurrent expenditures are to be met by domestic revenue. The result has been the introduction of taxes on various basic commodities leading to a rise in prices.

Political analyst at Mzuzu University, Noel Mbowela, said the protests have shown that Malawians appreciate that it is possible to turn things around even against a “repressive government”. He said this protest was a clear message to government to address the concerns raised.

However, Mutharika also disputed that the country was badly run. “We have brought down inflation to single digits. We have enough to feed our people and sell outside the country. We were able to hold free and fair elections in 2009. We are making progress in fighting HIV/AIDS. These achievements, in my view, are not consistent with the so-called bad governance,” he said.

Similar protests were last held in 1992 and unseated the late president Hastings Kamuzu Banda.

Excerpt:

By Charles Mpaka
MACHINGA DISTRICT, Malawi, Jul 19 2011 (IPS)

Ethel James cannot wait for the gravity-fed water scheme in her area to be fixed so that she and the other women in her village will no longer have to wake up before dawn everyday to queue for water.

Community members are replacing the old pipes of the gravity-fed water scheme with new and larger ones. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

The water supply system fell to disrepair in the mid-1990s after government could no longer maintain it.

With the assistance of Water Aid Malawi, an international charity that assists people in accessing safe drinking water and sanitation, the community has taken over ownership of the scheme that covers Kwilasha village in Machinga District, southern Malawi and 13 surrounding villages.

People have been organised into clubs, with women assuming leading roles. Women are also involved in the laying of pipes and the digging of trenches. Community members are replacing old pipes with new and larger ones and expanding the network to reach more people.

Every morning before James begins work on the repairs, she rises at 4am and walks an hour to the only functioning borehole in the neighbouring village. She returns home with just a bucket of water, which her five children use to get ready for school.

The nearest alternative source of water is a river just 10 minutes away, but at this time of the year it is dry. But even during the rainy season it is a river that James avoids because there is a possibility of encountering crocodiles here. They swim up from Malawi’s main Shire River, which is linked to this tributary.

“So we just dig wells in the village, but that is also a problem because cholera becomes rampant since the water is unsafe. Now that it is the dry season, the wells no longer have water, so we rely on the borehole,” says James. Until the mid-1990s, access to running water was not a problem in the district as it had 10 functional water schemes, which government constructed in 1980.

However, all the schemes collapsed in 1994 when government changed the ownership policy and wanted the communities to manage the schemes. Many villagers did not have the skills to repair the facilities and were unable to raise money to buy spare parts. So the schemes collapsed.

“Government heaped the responsibility of running the schemes in the laps of people who were ignorant on how to go about managing them,” says villager Ndojime Zakaria who dug trenches for the scheme in 1980.

The government also decided to move away from building and maintaining gravity-fed water schemes to focus on drilling boreholes as a means of providing water.

However, water sector analysts in Malawi have faulted boreholes sunk in the decade after 1994. They say the intervention was often not based on hydrological expertise, but on the influence of politicians seeking patronage. Many were also accused of giving business to drilling companies in which they had interests. This resulted in an inequitable distribution of water points and the malfunctioning of most facilities.

The community suffered on both fronts: their gravity-fed scheme had collapsed and the borehole system had largely failed. This forced women to fetch water from unsafe sources or crocodile-infested rivers in the district.

“Without the scheme, the alternative water sources are either distant or dangerous because most rivers here pour into the main Shire River, which is home to thousands of crocodiles. Sometimes, these crocodiles follow the smaller rivers posing such a danger to women who go there to get water,” says Steve Meja, the district water officer for Machinga.

But now Water Aid Malawi and the Machinga district council have since trained the community in leadership, project management, finance raising, catchment area conservation and sanitation. It is expected that once the repair to this water system is completed, it will reach Kwilasha village and 13 other surrounding villages. Its reach will spread to about 45,000 people, which is three times more than it used to serve in the 1990s.

James says that repairing the water system will make a difference to the lives of the women in her village. “Women suffer most when there is a water shortage. Now we’re learning every skill so that we (can) maintain the scheme ourselves and ensure a reliable water supply. Our work does not stop at digging trenches; we also join men in laying pipes and fixing the facilities,” says James.

Monalisa Nkhonjera, the programme officer responsible for communication at Water Aid Malawi, says the involvement of women in “rough and dirty” jobs, such as fixing pipes, enables them to rely on themselves to maintain the scheme.

The scheme has started functioning in some villages and each household contributes 13 cents a month for buying accessories and constructing new water points. The community has been organised into a water user association. They have a bank account where some of the money is saved as capital for when Water Aid Malawi hands over the facilities to the people.

In the sections where water is running, women are also taking the lead in promoting sanitation and hygiene. Through volunteer sanitation committees, the women visit households to discuss proper water storage, the need to wash one’s hands after using the toilet, and how to manage water points.

James thinks the scheme will not collapse again, mostly because women are no longer spectators in the project. She says she now knows how to repair a tap and where to buy spare parts for the system.

“Having suffered the worst since the collapse of the scheme, we are doing all we can to learn everything so that we are able to maintain it ourselves even when the men are not there. An efficient water supply will help us look after our families well,” she says.

Water Aid Malawi has already assisted with the rehabilitation of another water scheme in the district. Government is set to revive the rest of the schemes with an African Development Bank loan using the same approach of community ownership.

Excerpt:

By Charles Mpaka
NENO DISTRICT, Malawi
, Jun 10 2011 (IPS)

Seventy kilometres outside Malawi’s commercial capital, Blantyre, a profitable cooperative enterprise is providing villagers jobs and preserving forests.

The Zalewa forest in the southern Malawi district of Neno, like other wooded areas within reasonable distance of urban areas, has long been under pressure from people seeking wood for fuel.

A study released in May by the United Nations Development Programme estimated firewood provides 95 percent of rural household energy and 55 percent for urban households and that this high demand is causing rampant deforestation in Malawi.

Zalewa has been no exception. The area lies in a rain shadow zone, experts say. Rainfall is unreliable, and the land is often dry and difficult to till, forcing many people to rely on charcoal and firewood to make a living.

“Until around 2000, people here didn’t know that we could benefit from this forest in a more profitable way while also sustaining it,” says Tedson Kameta, a former charcoal maker.

He said one of the trees prized for charcoal production is the tamarind, a common feature of the Zalewa forest. Tamarind produces a hard, durable charcoal that lasts a long time in stoves.

But Kameta is today a member of the Village Hands collective, which has turned from chopping down and burning trees to harvesting wild fruit for a growing domestic market in Blantyre and beyond.

Locals had long soaked baobab and tamarind in water to make a drink. David Zuzanani, operations manager for Village Hands, says until a project came in the area in 1996, the villagers had no idea that they could develop that drink into a commercial enterprise.

In 1996, the non-governmental organisation Wildlife and Environmental Society of Malawi (WESM), with support from GTZ (the German Technical Cooperation agency), had established a forest conservation project in the area. The project had established indigenous tree nurseries and income-generating activities including bee-keeping, raising guinea fowl and making cane furniture as alternatives to making charcoal.

The project also improved and commercialised juice production, which has had the most lasting impact, according to the villagers.

“As soon as people realised they could make money out of juice and the fruits, they started raising awareness in their areas to protect the forest,” says Zuzanani, who also worked with the WESM project.

The cooperative now bottles as much as 10,000 litres of juice each month, putting training from WESM and GTZ to use in producing quality beverages that have been approved by the Malawi Bureau of Standards.

The juice sells for the equivalent of $1.60 in major supermarkets like Shoprite, and at service stations, bringing in an average turnover of about two thousand dollars per month. The coop employs 11 local workers full time in its one-roomed factory. Others find work here on a casual basis, sorting and peeling and breaking fruit.

Production is entirely manual – soaking fruit in three large containers, before pasteurising it and straining it for pulp. One innovative technique extracts additional nutrients from baobab seeds to give one of their juices a distinctive taste and brown colour.

The cooperative buys all its fruit from villagers. In 2008, Kameta made a hundred dollars from the sale of baobab fruit from his field. He bought three goats and feed for his dairy cow. Last year, he harvested 40 bags and made two hundred dollars. He plans to buy an oxcart and start raising guinea fowl.

Village Hands is managed by 14 trustees, including a chief from each village. Its board of advisors comprises business people, environmentalists and quality assurance experts. Its mission statement is to “use indigenous forests in the area in a sustainable way and with local business development to create an alternative source of income to charcoal production for communities”.

In years of good profits, they share the returns through financing a project that a trustee village chooses.

“Some villages have chosen orphan care centres. We have financed several such small projects. But we intend to grow the business so that we can finance bigger projects such as boreholes and school blocks,” says Zuzanani.

In spite of progress, charcoal production still remains the company’s number one enemy.

”We have protected forest zones close to the populated areas,” says Zuzanani. “These ones cannot be touched by anyone. The villages guard them. So much of the destruction is happening further off. Those people have money and they can corrupt anyone.

Chiefs are working hard to stop this but we also need the forestry department to help us.”

A forestry official at the main road block on the Shire River through which the charcoal passes to Blantyre confirmed the corruption. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said it was difficult for his department to control the trade.

“Government says [charcoal] traders should be arrested. That’s not practical. There is no law for that. Besides, there are economically-powerful and politically-connected individuals in the trade they would get you fired if you gave them trouble,” he said.

But the villagers think the company is the most important instrument for poverty reduction in the area.

“The factory is the best tool to improve living conditions for many people here, if it can grow. So we hope government sees what we’re doing and get these merchants out,” says Belita Ngomano, owner of a small grocery shop near where the factory is located.

She claims she and her husband opened the shop in 2009 with capital raised partly from selling tamarind fruits to the factory.

Excerpt:

By Charles Mpaka
BLANTYRE, Jun 9 2011 (IPS)

As government prepares to roll out the expensive new antiretroviral treatment regime recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO) this month, there are fears about the programme’s sustainability after two recent proposals for funding were rejected by the Global Fund.

The antiretrovirals government seeks to change. Credit: Charles Mpaka

But the new regime costs almost five times as much as the current one. Principal Secretary for HIV/AIDS and Nutrition in the office of president and cabinet, Mary Shawa, says government currently spends about 34 million dollars annually on ARVs. The new regime will cost up to 105 million dollars a year.

But she insists that despite the fact that the Global Fund has rejected two proposals from Malawi worth a total of 564 million dollars, government will go ahead using its own resources to meet the cost of the new treatment regime. “The president has directed that we migrate to the new regime,” she says.

But the Global Fund, United Nations and Department for International Development (Dfid) support 80 percent of Malawi’s health budget.

Reasons for the rejection have varied. Some say it was due to government’s failure to include in its proposal minority groups, such as same sex relationships, which are illegal in Malawi. Shawa says, however, that government included gays and lesbians in its proposal.

She described the rejection as normal and said government would find a way of ensuring that patients access the new treatment this year.

But the shortage of aid is not just from the Global Fund. The British government announced in May it is suspending all new aid to Malawi following the expulsion of the British envoy for accusing President Bingu wa Mutharika for being autocratic. Germany is also withholding part of its aid for alleged human rights violations by government. This has led to fears that Malawi will not manage the new regime.

But government has announced it is migrating to the new regime regardless and will be able to fund the programme for the next four and half years using its own resources. According to a study commissioned by government on how to implement the new ART guidelines, government will now have to provide treatment to more people. The study found that adopting the new procedures would entail that people living with HIV/AIDS would have to start taking drugs at a higher CD4 count of 350. This would raise the total number of patients on ART by 50 percent. Currently, there are 250,000 people receiving free treatment in public hospitals in Malawi, government records say.

Asked where exactly government would get the money from other than the Global Fund, Shawa said the money will come from other sources including domestic ones. But an inside official at the National Aids Commission says government is preparing another proposal to the Global Fund for the next round.

“I wouldn’t lie that government can manage it all alone for too long. For now though, the two rejections (by the Global Fund) helped government to look elsewhere for money, hence the current position that we can still support the programme for some time. If anything, absence of donor money means resources would have to be taken from other sectors. But we are confident we won’t go in that direction,” said the source.

Health activists are unsure whether government can sustain the new programme without Global Fund support but they applauded government for migrating to the new regime.

Martha Kwataine, the executive director for Malawi Health Equity Network (MHEN), a grouping of non- governmental organisations in health, says it is the constitutional mandate of government to provide quality health care services to its citizens regardless of how much it costs.

“The cost (of running the new regime) is very high but quality has a price. The lower the price, the lower the quality, and consequently the negative side effects of the drugs. The cost is worth it because there is no price tag for life. Considering the negative side effects that people living with HIV have had, especially women, it is time for Malawi to change to the new regime,” she said.

And there are some who cannot wait for the new regime. While waiting in a queue to get her antiretrovirals at Chiradzulu District Hospital just outside Blantyre, a female patient showed IPS her legs claiming they were disfigured because of her ART.

“Honestly, the only good thing with these drugs is that I am still alive. But the side effects make me very uncomfortable. My legs were not like this. When I started taking the drugs in 2008, I felt pain in the legs for about four weeks. Doctors just said it was the side effects of the treatment,” she said, opting for anonymity.

Two other women on the queue complained about experiencing nausea and stomach protrusion.

The last time Malawi reviewed its AIDS treatment protocol was in 2008 when it adopted the current first-line combination of stavudine, lamivudine and nevirapine.

Excerpt:

By Charles Mpaka
BLANTYRE, May 25 2011 (IPS)

In the shade of a leafy mango tree at the rural Chipho Health Centre in Thyolo, southern Malawi, Melifa Faison sits looking frequently down the road hoping to see an ambulance. Lying beside her is her 6-year-old daughter, weak with malaria.

The medical assistant has referred the child to a larger health centre 22 kilometres (km) away for proper treatment.

“He (the medical assistant) says she will need to be put on a drip and they don’t have the supplies,” says Faison.

The centre does not have the first line drugs for malaria, the top killer of children in Malawi. This is Faison’s second visit in 10 days. On the first visit her daughter was given painkillers.

“I was informed there was no medicine (for malaria) then,” she says.

Located in the border with Mozambique, Chipho Health Centre is the only one in the catchment area of 16,500 people, according to staff at the centre. It is 65km away from the district hospital along a rocky and rugged road that passes through several hills.

McOwen Chagwa is the medical assistant here. He relies on a radio communication system for emergency calls for an ambulance and supplies. There are no private pharmacies in the area.

“It’s difficult working here. What makes life tougher is I can’t assist people properly because of the shortage of medicines and equipment,” says Chagwa.

Chagwa explains that the health centre regularly sends the list of drugs and equipment it requires to the district health office. But the medicines hardly come on time.

“That becomes a problem especially for children who form the largest number of our clients here,” he says.

He is the only qualified medical worker at the centre. The nurse left two weeks ago because she had found another job in the city.

Health experts say inadequate number of nurses and pharmacists is among the leading factors denying people access to medicines in Malawi.

Studies by Malawi Health Equity Network (MHEN), a group of civil society organisations in the health sector, show that while the Central Medical Stores, government’s drug procurement agency, may stock up to 85 percent of the essential drugs, district hospitals do not have most medicines because of shortage of staff to process the ordering. This affects availability of the medicines in outlying posts.

Official figures at the department of health show that by December 2009, there were only two fully qualified pharmacists in Malawi. There were also two pharmacy technicians in each of the 28 districts in Malawi.

In 2010 20 new pharmacists graduated from the University of Malawi’s College of Medicine. This was the first crop of students in Malawi to train as pharmacists following a government programme to address staff shortage.

But the number is still too inadequate to meet the demand for staff for drug procurement for hospitals, says MHEN’s executive director Martha Kwataine.

“Pharmacists are the ones supposed to process drug requisitions from Central Medical Stores through district hospitals. But we know Central Medical Stores always complains that orders come in late. It’s because hospitals don’t have the right staff to do the ordering,” says Kwataine.

Unavailability of essential drugs has been another outstanding problem. Hardest hit are areas like Chipho because they are difficult to reach and are shunned by medical personnel due to lack of infrastructure such as electricity and good housing.

In 2000, government launched the essential health package (EHP) aimed at improving access to health services in public hospitals. The plan included training medical staff and increasing availability of medicines.

Health rights activists say the programme has helped to improve access to medicines and health services through incentives for retention and recruitment of staff. But the situation is still as bad, they say.

The EHP contained 150 types of essential medicines to treat over 11 health conditions. A 2008 MHEN study found that it was still difficult for most rural communities to access free medicines from public clinics. Only 20 percent of those medicines were available in most rural hospitals. In response, civil society organisations launched a campaign against drug stock outs in 2009. Three years on, MHEN says the campaign has helped to make government aware of its obligation and moved it to act accordingly in some cases. But the battle is far from being won. Still critically understaffed and lacking in essential infrastructure such as roads and vehicles to transport medicines, most rural locations are still poorly serviced, it says.

In Thyolo the international Medecines Sans Frontieres (MSF) runs an HIV/AIDS programme. But it also assists government in delivering patients between health centres.,However, MSF winds up its programme in 2013 and people are worried.

“Once MSF leaves, the crisis will deepen. Already, it’s common to see women delivering in tea bushes while on their way to hospital. For us, the choice is between a badly serviced health centre and a traditional healer,” said villager Felix Yaruwera.

During the rainy season, the road to Chipho is impassable. The alternative route is 200km long. “That leaves us out at a critical time. Malaria is rampant in rainy season. So, I would say many children do die,” says Chagwa.

Spokesperson for department of health Henry Chimbali admits that most rural areas in Malawi are yet to see “significant improvement” in delivery of health services.

He says government has since drawn up a plan to make use of health surveillance assistants already available in the communities to attend to most basic health concerns such as fevers, headaches and diarrhoea and accelerate efforts on preventive measures.

Chimbali says the assistants will not be turned into clinicians. But rather, if they get more involved, they will bridge the human resource gap, therefore allowing medical staff time to also attend to drug orders and distribution.

He also suggests that bringing hospitals closer to people will increase access to medicines.

“Ideally, the plan is to have a health facility within a radius of 8km. That’s still a long way off. So, we are introducing mobile and village clinics to service the underserved areas,” he says.

Meanwhile, Faison has been waiting for two hours. The longer the ambulance takes to arrive, the more anxious she gets at the possibility that it might not come. “Sometimes, it doesn’t come until the following day. I pray that shouldn’t be the case today. My daughter is not well at all,” she says.

Excerpt:

By Charles Mpaka
BLANTYRE, Malawi, Dec 20 2010 (IPS)

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.

People Collecting Water at One of Kiosks Credit: Charles Mpaka

“That was our nightmare,” says Sphiwe Adams, a resident of the township for over 20 years.

Naotcha’s only reliable source of water for drinking, cooking and domestic use was a spring high on the slopes of Soche Mountain, 600 metres from where the township’s edge meets the forest.

Naotcha property owner Eluby Mkwanda, recalls the response from new tenants in the three houses she owns near that boundary.

“Once you took the women up the mountain on their first day, you would see the anger on their faces. They would not talk to you and would scream at their husbands for bringing them here. So, many houses for rent remained mostly vacant.”

Naotcha lies about 20 kilometers from the state-run Blantyre Water Board’s nearest reservoir. The tank was constructed in 1964 to service the surrounding planned settlements of Kanjedza and Zingwangwa.

But Blantyre City’s population grew from about 113,000 in 1966 to 502,000 in 1998 – it’s presently estimated at 670,000. Surging urban migration, beginning in the early 1990s, is blamed for the city’s rapidly expanding slums.

In 40 years, the Board has not made any major investment to expand its network and ensure an uninterrupted water supply, its spokesperson told IPS.

In 1998, Chimombo was the chairperson of the community’s development committee. The area’s water woes quickly became his biggest concern.

In 1999, he approached Malawi Social Action Fund (MASAF), a World Bank- financed programme, for support. MASAF said it would consider the proposal, but only for its next round of projects, seven years later.

“I felt the responsibility to save the situation squarely falling on my shoulders,” Chibombo says. “I had led people into believing that we would have water. Now I didn’t want them to go on suffering for another seven years.”

That very week, using money from his small welding business, he purchased a stand pipe, an empty 100-litre drum, a bag of cement and domestic electrical conduit.

In a day’s work, he planted the drum in the mountain and rigged up an inlet to draw water from the spring into the drum. Then he plumbed 20 mm pipes from the bottom end of the drum and laid a line 700 metres down to a clearing on the edge of the township.

And the water flowed.

“There was a celebration that day. A miracle had happened. We did not believe him after the MASAF rejection but he went ahead using boys from his business,” recalls Mkwanda.

But this water point was still far from many residents of the sprawling township. Chimombo extended the main distribution line another 1.5 km to a second kiosk of two taps.

He was supplying the water free of charge. But his business suffered as he kept draining money from it to run the project. In 2000 residents decided to start paying “as a way of thanking him”. They are buying water at 4 cents per 20 litres, a cent higher than at the Board’s kiosks.

Chimombo’s scheme has expanded to 20 kiosks feeding from three fountains in the mountain. They supply water 24 hours a day.

His three ‘reservoirs’, now replaced with concrete cisterns, are cleaned inside once every month during which time the water is also treated with chlorine supplied by Blantyre City Council.

Refusing to own the project, Chimombo has handed over management of 16 kiosks to others. They maintain the network and monitor water sales in their zones. The money is theirs.

From the four kiosks under his charge, Chimombo collects about 14 dollars daily from each kiosk.

A local NGO, Sustainable Rural Growth and Development Initiative, has linked the group to the city council for access to training in management. It also supports the team in restoring the forest that has undergone degradation and expanding the network to a nearby low density location.

The organisation’s executive director Maynard Nyirenda says Chimombo’s invention illustrates how Malawi can exploit its vast water resources to eliminate water supply problems.

Ironically, his innovation is yet to reach his own rundown house. His wife walks some 20 minutes to one of the kiosks for water. Occasionally, they can access water from a Water Board tap in their yard.

But such days are very rare, Chibombo says. “I am satisfied that what began as a small thing has benefited thousands of people. There are still residents getting water from dirty streams but I think that will change as the project grows.”

For Sphiwe Adams, no resident can ever thank Chimombo enough. “Only God knows how best to thank him,” she says as she lifts her bucket at one of the kiosks.

Excerpt:

By Charles Mpaka
LILONGWE, Sep 24 2010 (IPS)

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.

Chief Kwataine, who has 89 villages in Ntcheu under his traditional authority, launched a maternal health campaign that first addressed common cultural beliefs associated with pregnancy, for example that a woman’s first child should be born at home or that the men of the family decide when women need medical attention. Kwataine also banned all traditional birth attendants in his villages, compelling women to give birth in hospital.

These measures have gone hand in hand with a widespread maternal health education campaign. In each of the 89 villages, between two and five skilled maternal counsellors register every pregnancy and advise mothers on best practices for achieving maternal health. Bright messages sprayed on the walls of villagers’ houses are bold reminders of important health messages.

“We also monitor their hospital visits. Every time they go for an antenatal check-up, they bring their medical passports to us so that we can record what’s been entered by the hospital,” explains Pilirani Nkhoma, who is one of the maternal counsellors.

Tangible results

The results have been tangible. Between 2000 and 2005, before the chief started the maternal health initiative, the area recorded 52 maternal deaths. But not a single woman in the 89 villages under Chief Kwataine’s authority has died during childbirth in the past three years.

This is unheard of in Malawi, where 510 women die per 100,000 live births, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Even though this number is down from 807 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2006, Malawi will not achieve Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5 of improving maternal health.

To meet MDG 5, the country would have to bring the number down to 155 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births by 2015, which the country’s government admits will be impossible to achieve.

Kwataine’s maternal health initiative faces a number of hurdles, however, since the measures can only be successful in the long-term if they are accompanied by sufficient human and financial resources in the public health sector. The hospital closest to Kwataine’s area of traditional authority, for example, now receives almost twice as many pregnant women than the maternity ward has capacity to admit and struggles to assist all women in need.

“By all accounts, the campaign in Kwataine’s area is a brilliant approach. But we are almost buckling here now because we do not have corresponding resources,” a health official who preferred to remain anonymous told IPS.

Lack of capacity

Experts fear that gains made in reducing maternal mortality could be reversed because of lack of skilled health workers and hospital capacity.

The national health department hasn’t been able to get a grip on the problem. In 2005, it promised to recruit more midwives and upgrade health facilities, with a view to boosting maternal health, but five years down the line, skilled health workers are still too few and health facilities remain poorly equipped.

The Malawi Health Equity Network (MHEN), a Lilongwe-based independent alliance of organisations and individuals promoting equity and quality in health, faults government specifically on budget distribution. A report in which it analyses the national health budget shows that in the past four years, the health department has allocated between 50 and 60 percent of its annual budget towards activities at the health ministry headquarters, instead of using those funds for the improvement of health facilities throughout the country.

“This is money spent on allowances and four-wheel drive vehicles that race in the streets of the capital, yet 80 percent of Malawians are in the rural areas where health problems are forever acute,” complains MHEN executive director Martha Kwataine.

Showing initiative

Well aware of the questionable spending priorities of the national health department, chief Kwataine and his people decided not to wait for government to provide all services.

Malawi’s rural population, even though largely poor, has the power to find its own solutions to the country’s maternal health woes, the chief believes. On the back of a successful community-driven safe motherhood initiative, he managed to mobilise his people to donate money to construct their own clinic, which will be offering basic emergency obstetric services.

“We believe that the clinic will ease pressure at the main hospital, therefore allowing more women to access better services there and also ensuring faster attention here,” he explains.

Kwataine also hopes that government will become aware of the successes he achieved in his villages and will make funds available for other communities to replicate the approach: “If communities around the country committed themselves into doing programmes of this nature, and if government came in to support such initiatives, Malawi would have a better story to tell in 2015.”

Excerpt:

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.

Water kiosk. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

“The [water users] association has made a big difference here,” says Fatima Misoya, a resident and water vendor at the kiosk. “We no longer get water from dirty streams.”

A bit more than half of the 38 kiosks in the shanty township of Nkolokoti-Kachere used to be run by the state-owned Blantyre Water Board. The others were managed by community, religious and political party leaders.

The water association’s administrator, Gloria Matchowa, says local leaders just pocketed the money residents paid for water, and rarely settled their bills with the Water Board. This resulted in frequent disconnections, sometimes lasting for years, she says.

The Water Board’s vendors mostly came from outside the community. They turned up late or not at all. Supply interruptions and other problems with the water mains went untended for long periods.

“The Board constructed the kiosks because many people here are poor. They cannot afford personal taps. But the kiosks were being too badly run to serve the intended purpose,” says Matchowa.

In January 2009, the kiosks owed Blantyre Water Board 11,000 dollars in unpaid bills. Over a third of them were in disrepair or had been disconnected, leaving many of the 90,000 people in the area struggling to access clean water.

Borrowing a successful model

But 350 kilometres away in the capital city, Lilongwe, the first water user association in that city was successfully serving 70,000 residents in the slum of Chinsapo.

The association is a formally-registered cooperative, with members of its board elected from the community to serve for two years. All the members come from the community, which promotes a sense of ownership of the facilities, Matchowa says.

The association took over operations, maintenance and revenue collection for the kiosks.

The Water Board handed over the kiosks on condition that the debt would be settled. Matchowa says they started with no other capital – not even spare parts to maintain or repair damaged facilities.

Rapid success

Where under previous management, rates for water varied between 4 and 6 cents for 20 litres, the association sells water for the equivalent of 2 cents for 20 litres. But within three months, the association cleared the debt and managed to repair all the broken kiosks.

“What we have learnt is that supplying water is big business,” says Matchowa. “With good management, we don’t have to sell at high rates to make good returns.”

The association takes in around $10,000 every month. About $2,000 goes to paying the Water Board for water supplied. Some of the money is spent on parts for repairs, gradually equipping their rented office – most recently they bought a computer – and some is set aside to construct more kiosks and eventually buy a vehicle for the association.

The association has 57 permanent employees and has built three new kiosks, with plans to construct two more this year.

WaterAid Malawi, which introduced the concept of a water users association in Malawi, says these cooperatives are based on a philosophy of cost recovery and even turning a profit while meeting the need for clean water supply.

Amos Chigwenembe is responsible for policy at WaterAid. He says kiosks may not be the ideal way to supply water, but if managed efficiently, they are useful in unplanned settlements.

Problems upstream

The association’s major foe is unreliable water supply by the Water Board. For a long time, the corporation has been under fire for failing to serve Blantyre’s 670,000 people.

The Board blames the failure on dilapidated infrastructure that needs an overhaul from intake to distribution point. Much of the equipment was laid in 1960s and now frequently succumbs to breakdowns.

No major investment has been made for over 40 years.

“The design capacity of our production system is far below today’s requirements,” says the Board’s acting public affairs and marketing manager Catherine Chilemba.

The water supplier is also struggling against losses due to illegal connections, leakages and frequent power outages by the electricity provider Escom. The Board claims its customers owe it 20 million dollars in unpaid bills.

In November 2009, the Malawian government launched a $5 million national water development programme with Blantyre Water Board as one of the targets. In the four-year programme, the Board will rehabilitate its network and increase production of clean water from the current 78,000 cubic metres per day to 96,000 m3 per day in 2013.

The Nkolokoti-Kachere Water Users Association is full of expectation. It cannot do anything about the bad housing in its area, it says, although it meets with residents regularly on sanitation and hygiene issues.

“But we can help ease the poverty through giving potable water at affordable price. Improvements at the Board will enable us supply water reliably and grow our business,” Matchowa says.

By Charles Mpaka
THYOLO DISTRICT, Malawi, Aug 12 2010 (IPS)

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.

One of 24 members of this irrigation scheme in the rural district of Thyolo, Jusa’s plot measures just 50 by 20 metres. But she says it gives her enough income to meet the basic needs of her family of three children. She attributes her success to agricultural extension services.

“Mr Sakaika [the government extension worker] comes here often. It’s because of his instructions that we are able to benefit so greatly from such small fields,” she says.

Amongst the lucky few

But the Thyolo farmers are a happy exception to the rule. Research by the global anti-poverty group ActionAid, suggests that extension services, which provide advice and training for farmers, have collapsed in most parts of Malawi.

The government admits that extension services are weak, but it blames the AIDS pandemic for shortage of staff.

Malawi’s Civil Society Agriculture Network (CISANET) says Malawi’s farmers used to enjoy vibrant support from the ministry of agriculture, when government was the main provider of the services. That was before the introduction of market liberalisation policies in the 1980s.

The new policies, according to CISANET national coordinator Victor Mhoni, eliminated government’s role as the principal extension services provider. The expectation was that the private sector would fill the gap.

The government cut back sharply on spending in this area. ActionAid says between 1996 and 1998, government allocated 67 percent of the agricultural budget to extension services. That spending had fallen to just seven percent last year, it says.

In the 2010/11 national budget, government has allocated 213 million dollars for the ministry of agriculture. Out of this allocation, the farm input subsidy programme gets $133 million. Research and extension work gets $9 million – four percent of the total agriculture budget. The balance will purchase maize for the national strategic grain reserves.

Bretton-Woods at fault?

Action Aid specifically blames donors such as the World Bank for the government’s retreat from agricultural support. Their fixation on agriculture for economic growth rather than food security, the organisation says, has resulted in the fall of extension services in Malawi.

The World Bank maintains that a mix of public workers, private firms, civil society organisations and community level structures should provide extension services.

“Eventually, we will be able to reduce the decline that has been there and accelerate productivity of small farms. This approach has been tried in other countries in Africa and it is working,” says Hardwick Tchale, the Bank’s agricultural economist in Malawi.

The Bank’s World Development Report of 2008 calls for the decentralisation of agriculture development services.

The report mentions Senegal and Uganda as countries that have enjoyed success in contracting out extension services and other agriculture-related activities. ActionAid disputes this account of what’s happened in Uganda and elsewhere in its response to the 2008 report, a 25-page publication assessing the Bank’s record on agriculture.

“In practice, the extension service has little private sector involvement, but it also suffers from major under-investment by the state. Thus it is the worst of both worlds, and it is farmers who suffer,” the authors write.

Following its instincts

Malawi enjoys a measure of fame for having ignored the advice of the Bank when it embarked on a major subsidy programme to put seeds and fertiliser in smallholder farmers’ hands; combined with good rains, this has rapidly improved agricultural productivity.

In contrast, a senior official in Malawi’s agriculture department is not optimistic over the success of the extension service policy that government drew up in 2000 with World Bank.

“Even if farmers took the initiative to seek advice as the policy wants [them to], they would not find the workers in the districts because we do not have enough of them. And you can’t force the private sector to get into this business,” he said, requesting anonymity as he is not mandated to speak on behalf of the department.

ActionAid says the ratio of extension workers to farming households is 1 for every 3,000, far in excess of the government’s target of 1:500.

“We will draw up policies and research on technologies aimed at developing our agriculture,” the ministry official told IPS. “But I think we are leaving out a very important aspect that would actualise all such plans and findings. Government is not investing in extension. We don’t have to wait until we put in irrigation schemes for farmers before they get the services.”

He said the available extension workers struggle in the absence of even basic tools such as motorcycles and bicycles that would let them visit farmers in their areas of responsibility.

Maximise existing resources

Speaking to IPS on the sidelines of the Forum for Agricultural Research for Africa (FARA) conference in Burkina Faso at the end of July, FARA executive director Dr Monty Jones said African governments could compensate to some degree for the shortage of staff and lack of mobility by exploiting new communication technologies.

“Africa is now considered the fastest growing market for mobile phones. It makes sense for our agriculture systems to adopt these technologies to exchange extension information,” he said.

Thyolo district extension worker Sakaika has a bicycle and a mobile phone. He is responsible for 57 irrigation schemes which serve close to 4,000 farmers.

“When I visit one scheme today, it takes a long time to return to it. So the mobile phone keeps me in touch with the farmers,” he said.

And his efforts are paying off. Enock Mpeni, 48, is chairperson of the irrigation scheme to which Jusa belongs. He has been a maize farmer all his life but he says he has found farming more profitable since 2007 when he started accessing extension services through the scheme.

Mpeni explained how knowledge of how much space to leave between plants, the number of seeds per hole, when and what fertiliser to apply, and better record keeping have all helped him become a better farmer.

Like Mpeni, Jusa plants one seed of hybrid maize per hole, 30 centimetres apart. The crop matures within three months, so she plants four times yearly.

According to Sakaika, a 50 by 20 metre field should hold 5,000 planting stations which can produce up to 10,000 cobs. Jusa sells the maize while it’s still fresh.

In the last harvest in June, Jusa made 350 dollars from her field. In 2008, the first year she was in the irrigation scheme Sakaika supports, she made a total of 1,600 dollars.

And despite the hot sun, she is excited. “We are going to be rich,” she says, laughing.

Excerpt:

By Charles Mpaka
BLANTYRE, Aug 4 2010 (IPS)

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.

The agent will deal with customs officials, going over forms, calculating import and excise duty…

Gondwe is a veteran trader, but the technicalities of the transaction remain opaque to her. She casts frequent glances in the direction of the offices – a man posing as a clearing agent once duped her once and disappeared with her money.

Her anxiety is broken by the chattering of the other women in her company.

“Somebody is running around with the form and I do not know how long it will take. I just have to wait,” Gondwe says. “Four hours later, he returns and I also have to pay him for his work. It’s torture.”

Steve Kapoloma, taxpayer education and public relations manager at the Malawi Revenue Authority, says many small scale traders arrive at the border without enough money to pay the fees for their goods. Others arrive unsure what documentation is supposed to accompany their goods.

He concedes it makes little business sense for a trader with a consignment worth less than 500 dollars to be held up for four hours or longer at the border. He says that’s why traders so frequently resort to smuggling, risking confrontation with law enforcement officials.

Smuggling also means a modest amount of customs revenue is lost to Malawi and its neighbours, but much more damaging is the effect on compiling reliable statistics on trade volumes.

“These figures assist in development planning and trade management,” says Maurice Gondwe (no relation to Cecilia), a research and projects officer at the Malawi Export Promotion Council (MEPC).

The traders waiting patiently under the tree are deeply envious of their counterparts whose business takes them across the border between Malawi and Zambia: they are enjoying the benefits of the Simplified Trade Regime (STR).

At the Mwami/Mchinji Border Post, small-scale traders entering and returning from Zambia no longer need a clearing agent: a simple form has been designed specifically for small shipments.

Less than half as long, the simplified form’s second page consists of instructions and a glossary of terms. So if the trader does not know what “Port of clearance”, “Net weight”, “Declaration by exporter/importer”, “Quantity” and “Identification of transport” mean, the explanations are right there.

Import and export duties for consignments under $500 have been waived; also gone also is the requirement for a certificate of origin.

The Common Market for the Eastern and Southern Africa is behind the simplified regime. Peter Oldham, Coordinator of Cross Border Trade at COMESA says Malawi and Zambia were the first of the regional trade body’s 10 members to agree to pilot the STR back in 2006.

Oldham explains that a similar regime is being implemented in a slightly different form in the East African Community region. There Uganda took the lead, followed by Rwanda.   The regime fosters shared interests amongst member states, Oldham says.

“The STR is a process whereby governments have to agree a common approach to dealing with small traders. Agreeing a common list of goods that are not dutiable and do not require a Certificate of Origin is recognition of common interest to promote trade,” he says.

Economic policy analyst Mavuto Bamusi agrees there are numerous benefits, but has reservations. He fears the simplified trade rules could choke development of production in Malawi.

Bamusi says Zambian traders are more experienced and aggressive than Malawian traders. Trade volume between the two countries presently favours Zambia, according to COMESA’s statistics. In 2008, Zambia’s exports to Malawi amounted to 60 million dollars while its imports from Malawi valued only about 12 million dollars.

“STR may widen these imbalances which may affect local production, unless government puts in measures to protect the local industry,” Bamusi says.

But the MEPC’s Maurice Gondwe disagrees. “The agreement is challenging us to step up production and take advantage of the duty free goods slot.”

The list of duty free goods is dominated by agricultural products including bananas, live rabbits, onions, sunflower seeds, live goats, tomatoes, potatoes, live sheep, smoked fish, and mushrooms. Malawi’s agriculture sector is growing, he argues.

“Let’s instead educate our traders that there is no more need for them to be smuggling goods. Things are now fairer for them and they stand a chance to make good profits and grow their businesses,” he says.   Zambia reached agreement with Zimbabwe over a Simplified Trade Regime in June, and COMESA expects to see the STR implemented across members states by the end of 2010.

Cecilia Gondwe and her party at the Mwanza border post will have to struggle on, though. Mozambique is not part of the COMESA bloc. South Africa has not yet implemented the regime and the other country along her trade route, Mozambique, is not part of the COMESA bloc.

*The second in a two-part series looking at the Simplified Trade Regime between Malawi and its neighbours.

Excerpt:

By Charles Mpaka
BLANTYRE, Mar 18 2010 (IPS)

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

The new dictionary translates Chichewa to English and English to Chichewa and has 35,000 entries. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

With 35,000 entries, the new book which translates Chichewa to English (CE) and English to Chichewa (EC) is the first comprehensive dictionary of its kind in Malawi. It is new on the shelves of Malawi’s book stores and was published last year.

The 730-paged dictionary is a personal copy but it is not for Ndalama’s use alone. If it is not with her, she said, it is being exchanged among the teachers at her school and even among the learners in her class.

“It is the most used book that I have on this desk. It is the only copy that we have at the school at the moment while we wait for the school to purchase its own. It is also richer in content than the previous dictionaries,” Ndalama told IPS.

English is widely spoken in Malawi owing to the country’s British colonial past, and it is the language of official communication. But Chichewa is spoken by all ethnic groups in the country. Government declared Chichewa (also known as Chinyanja) a national language in 1968.

According to Dr Steven Paas, a Dutch researcher who compiled and edited the dictionary, Chichewa is an important daily communication tool for more than 15 million people in Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa.

The new CE-EC dictionary traces its origin to 1997 when it began as a small personal note of vocabulary to assist Paas, an expatriate Theology lecturer, in learning the country’s most used language, Chichewa.

New to Malawi where he was seconded to the Church of Central African Presbyterian, Paas experienced what he calls “a crisis of communication” between himself and Malawians because of the absence of a dictionary.

All that was available at that time were a limited number of student guides that did not have a wide variety of words. Also, there were errors in the interpretation of some words and expressions. This hindered his efforts to learn the language of his host country, Paas says.

But it is not just foreigners who are affected. Paas says the lack of ability to easily translate words and meanings from Chichewa to English and from English to Chichewa also affects all situations of learning and communication. It affects the poor, the illiterate, orphans and the sick, because it bars their social mobility and emancipation.

But now you can flip through the dictionary and learn that the Chichewa word for notebook is kabuku kolembera; that madona ndi mabwana means ‘ladies and gentleman’ and monga mwa chikhalidwe chathu means ‘according to our tradition’.

Paas believes that for one to really understand the important things in life, it should be translated into a tongue that is familiar to one’s own culture and psychology.

“It (Chichewa) does for the nucleus of society what English cannot do, (that is), it bridges the gap of basic communication, combating illiteracy, promoting cultural self-confidence, igniting economical activity, and especially expanding knowledge,” Paas says.

To educate himself in the language of his host country, Paas started to collect Chichewa words and he would circulate the list to his learners and colleagues. In turn the students and colleagues assisted with expanding and refining the list with their own additions and recommendations.

The list was finally compiled into a dictionary that has six editions.

Ndalama has used these previous editions in her English language lessons. She says they were useful books, especially because Malawi did not have other Chichewa-English reference books with substantial content and word diversity.

Paas’ efforts on Chichewa-English lexicography succeed other attempts that started in the 19th century when the first missionaries in Malawi collected Chichewa words to assist them in teaching Malawians their faith.

However, the collections were no more than a list of basic words and therefore limited in its usefulness.

A more comprehensive book was published in 2000 when the Centre for Language Studies at the University of Malawi produced a 366-paged Chichewa-only dictionary. Nevertheless, because of its monolingual nature, this dictionary fell short of expectations.

This is why Paas’ dictionary is enjoying such acclaim.

Ndalama, who has taught English for 12 years, has been using Paas’ CE and EC dictionaries to explain to her learners the meanings and definitions of some words encountered during her lessons.

“We grow up speaking Chichewa and when we meet an English word, it is sometimes difficult to have a clear explanation for it. So, I often consulted the EC dictionary where I could have the English word with its Chichewa meaning. Then I would construct a meaningful English interpretation out of that,” she said.

However, Ndalama discovered later that the books had errors in translations and did not contain some words.

She recalled how one day, while going through a comprehension passage in Form 1, a learner asked her the meaning of the word “allergy” which was in the passage.

“I was taken by surprise. I had an idea of what it was but I could not give a precise and clear definition that my students could grasp easily,” she said.

She picked up her EC dictionary but when she consulted it, she realised the book did not have the word. She had to use her Oxford Advanced English Dictionary to explain the word. She is convinced she would have explained it better if the word was available in her EC dictionary.

Andrew Goodson, a Classics teacher at the Kamuzu Academy, says that the previous CE-EC dictionaries had “thousands of errors”.

In his letter dated March 2008 to Paas, Goodison said the dictionaries contained words that were non-existent such as “snoringly”. They had problematic translations and errors in English idioms and in spellings such as “crasp” instead of “clasp”.

They also omitted useful words such as “probably”, “definitely”, “should”, “nor”, and “some”.

In compiling the new CE-EC dictionary, Paas led a team which assisted by adding to the contents and making corrections.

Apart from being sold at bookshops, the book is available at non-governmental institutions and from individuals. Money from the sales will fund the next print but direct sponsoring is still the main source of financing for the dictionary project, Paas says.

In the preface of the dictionary, Professor Pascal Kishindo, director of the Centre for Language Studies, says the new dictionary has proceeded from a well-managed interaction between tradition and innovation to a diverse dictionary of words.

Kishindo notes that although the book has decreased margins and font size to accommodate a combination of the previous CE and EC editions, the compression has not compromised the quality of the dictionary.

“The user who wishes to communicate and express himself or herself in English will find clear and detailed treatment of all the basic words with numerous indicators pointing to the appropriate translations, and assisting him/her to use the language correctly,” says Kishindo, who is also a Linguistics lecturer at the University of Malawi.

Peg Williams is a Canadian volunteer working with a local youth organisation based in the rural town centre of Luchenza in southern Malawi.

Her work includes educating young people on HIV/AIDS. She told IPS that when she came to Malawi in January, the first thing she bought was the dictionary to help her learn the local language.

“I am also trying to learn more with the help of Malawians that I am working with. I need to learn the language because I think my work will have an impact if I communicate with young people in the language that they are used to and which they can easily understand,” she said.

With the help of the dictionary, she has learnt to use the Chichewa versions for “sex”, “sexually transmitted diseases”, “paedophilia”, “orgasm”, “penis”, “counselling” and other related words and expressions useful in her work.

A senior education methods advisor in the ministry of education says the book will help with the implementation of the new primary school curriculum in Malawi.

A review of the curriculum in 2003 noted that learners in junior primary school had problems grasping concepts in English. This was because students are initially taught in Chichewa, but as they move to senior primary school learners are taught in English.

The reviewers recommended the CE-EC dictionary as one way of addressing the problem. The education ministry hopes that the new dictionary will aid learners with their studies.

Speaking to IPS, the Netherlands-based Paas says the dictionary is a tool not only for students and teachers but also for Africans, expatriates, foreign workers, tourists and those dealing with English and Chichewa at a scientific, scholarly and religious level.

Paas says his deepest motivation for the project is a spiritual one. Paas says he is convinced that the human heart needs its mother tongue to be really touched by religion.

Ndalama thinks the new dictionary has the capacity to reduce the language barrier between users of Chichewa and English.

But her criticism of the dictionary is that it lacks the phonetic pronunciations for the words.

“I have noticed that the words in the new dictionary do not have their phonetic descriptions. In my view, being able to pronounce the words helps in learning the language,” she said.

Paas is working on the second edition to be printed next year.

Excerpt:

By Charles Mpaka
BLANTYRE, Feb 25 2010 (IPS)

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.

While there have been four severe droughts in Malawi in the past 25 years, the Mulanje region was not affected by these. So this year’s drought is the first Yunus has experienced and she is deeply worried.

“I don’t know what punishment this is,” the 53-year-old tells IPS. “We have always enjoyed very good rains, maybe because of the mountain, but now I don’t know how to explain what we have this time.”

According to government records, last year the southern region produced a third of Malawi’s total annual maize harvest of 3.5 million tonnes.

Mulanje is one of the major maize-producing districts in Malawi. Here 81 percent of the 530,000 people survive on subsistence farming. During harvest, residents from Blantyre rush to Mulanje to buy cheap maize.

Apart from Mulanje, the dry spell has hit six other districts in the southern and central region. In Malawi, the rainy season often starts in early December and runs up to March. But in these districts rainfall has either not fallen or has been irregular since December.

Unofficial figures estimate that over 30,000 hectares of crop fields have been affected and that up to 120,000 families (an average of 720,000 people) could need food assistance in the region.

Government officials rank Mulanje as among the “badly hit” regions that will need food aid.

Quoting officials from the agriculture development divisions, local newspapers said last week that national food production could drop by 30 percent and that the south alone could register a drop of 60 percent compared to last year.

Government is now stepping in and has allocated 76 million dollars in the annual budget for food relief. According to the ministry of finance, the money is to be spent purchasing food for distribution to affected households.

President Bingu wa Mutharika, also the country’s minister of agriculture and the African Union chair, made a surprise tour of the major maize-producing areas in the south on Feb. 21.

He said Malawi would face a decline in food production this year but insisted that the country would still harvest enough to feed itself. There will not be surplus for export, he said.

Yunus, a widow, is not sure if she and her three children will survive if she does not harvest any maize this year.

“That (there will be enough food for the country) is for politicians to say. They talk about everyone. I am talking about myself and a few other families that I know of,” says Yunus.

Government says Malawi requires 2.4 million tonnes of maize to feed its 13 million people and that last season the country produced a surplus of 1.3 million metric tonnes.

According to economic policy analyst, Mavuto Bamusi, Malawi may have a national surplus but food security at household level is still an issue. He says this is partially because maize is not easily available and also because some households are too poor to buy the commodity.

“We have the maize in the national silos. Many households in Malawi do not have food throughout the year. This (brings) to the fore how government should spend this extra budget,” he says.

National coordinator for Civil Society Agriculture Network (Cisanet), Victor Mhoni, says the drought has placed a spotlight on Malawi’s reliance on maize as a staple food crop.

“As long as we continue to fill our food basket with maize only and rely on rain-fed agriculture, we are still a vulnerable country,” says Mhoni.

Apart from maize, Malawi also grows food crops such as cassava, rice and potatoes. But there is a tradition among Malawians to say that they have not eaten anything when they have had cassava or potatoes for lunch. Nsima (pap), which is made from maize flour, is the favourite meal.

Mhoni also accuses government of perpetuating this reliance on maize for food by encouraging farmers, especially those in districts that do well in other crops, to grow maize. Ministry of agriculture officials told IPS that there are no statistics yet about the number of farmers that have moved to maize farming from other crops.

But a good example is Likoma Island on Lake Malawi. Before the farm input subsidy programme started in 2005, people here used to rely on cassava for food. Now the island largely grows maize, which is slowly replacing cassava as the staple food crop for the 10,000 inhabitants.

“Our farm input subsidy programme has been about maize and fertilisers all across the country even in places that rely on rice and sorghum. The programme, in spite of its good intentions, has promoted that heavy dependence on maize and when it falls short, we are all suffering,” says Mhoni,

Mhoni, however, says the surplus of the past four years means that government will not be importing maize to feed people. Instead, local reserves will be purchased and distributed thereby ensuring that aid will reach those in need faster.

Government says it has stockpiled 140,000 tonnes of maize in the national grain silos found in the three regions of the country. It will also purchase an additional 30,000 tonnes of the grain from estate farmers and traders. The Agriculture Development and Marketing Corporation, a state-run farm produce marketer, says it has stockpiled 45,000 tonnes of maize.

Apart from mid-financial year grants from donors (donor support contributes to 40 percent of Malawi’s annual national budget), the relief fund is also reliant on the Malawi Revenue Authority.

“The (76 million dollars) provision is only an estimate. The full extent of the need is yet to be determined,” says minister of finance, Ken Kandodo.

But Bamusi says if people like Yunus are to be reached, food needs to be widely distributed.

“This money should bring the food to locations where those people that need it get it easily. It must also deal with the issues of pricing because to have food brought into an area is one thing and to have people being able to buy it is another,” he says.

During harvest time when there is a large supply of maize on the market, it sometimes sells at 20 cents per kilogramme. Currently, maize sells at around 40 cents per kilogramme.

Yunus, however, would have preferred a harvest to aid.

“I have been harvesting enough in the past years and was able to sell some to buy a few things for my family. Now I can see how much suffering we will go through if I harvest nothing, if Mulanje harvests nothing. Maize is everything for me,” Yunus says.

Excerpt:

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

Malawi is seeking to shield progress in food security against drought by establishing extensive irrigation projects. Credit: Ngolowindo Horticultural Cooperative Society/IPS

This is the motivation for the country’s green belt concept. It is strengthened by painful memories of the severe drought beginning early 2002 which triggered three years of hunger. By 2005, five million people were affected by famine, all while large quantities of water flowed out of the country to the oceans of the world.

Local agriculture experts explain that two districts in the southern tip of the country could feed the entire country all year round if the Shire River, which cuts through the length of this southern plain, was utilised for intensive irrigation farming.

Yet, the two districts, often troubled by floods, are among the most desperately poor in Malawi, and their inhabitants survive on food handouts from government and donors.

The programme seeks to make Malawi independent of rain-fed agriculture. For all the much-publicised success of subsidies for small-scale farmers over the past four years, Malawi must also thank good rains for the increased production.

The plan is to protect the gains in food security, reduce vulnerability to drought and to boost production still further by irrigating a million hectares of land in a swathe lying within 20 kilometres of the country’s three lakes and 13 perennial rivers.

Last season, Malawi produced 3.5 million tonnes of maize, the country’s staple crop. This is 1.1 million tonnes more than the country’s total annual consumption. Of the total harvest, only 300,000 tonnes came from irrigation farming.

The plan will also attempt to diversify crops, targeting increased production of wheat, rice, millet, cotton, lentils and beans for export.

The Lake Malawi-Shire River stretch is the most important in the project. A section of the East African Rift Valley, the watercourse extends a thousand kilometres from the head to the toes of Malawi – from the northernmost point to the southernmost one.

Apart from identifying new sites for irrigation, development of the belt will also include restoring infrastructure that has fallen into disuse. In February 2009, government invited bids from construction companies to establish, rehabilitate and manage 12 irrigation schemes as part of the programme.

Land issues

But what about issues of land, probably one of the most delicate factors in the implementation of the programme?

Much of the land in the designated belt is customary. The deputy minister for agriculture and food security, Margaret Mauwa, says government will not expropriate land.

“Our interest is particularly on small scale farmers. We will be grouping them and we believe that will help to deal with the problem of land holding through creation of ownership of the irrigations schemes,” says Mauwa.

The national irrigation policy says that management of the schemes will be the full responsibility of the beneficiaries through their legally constituted local farmer organizations

Through their organisations, the farmers will be encouraged to apply for a lease of the customary land. Alternatively, the farmers may apply to register the land as private land owned by a group of farmers, says the irrigation bill.

During his visits to Brazil and the U.S. in September 2009, president Bingu wa Mutharika invited foreign investors to come to Malawi to participate in the implementation of the project.

Farmer support

Government will bear the cost of establishing or rehabilitating the schemes prior to turnover. Thereafter, all operations, maintenance and replacement costs in the schemes are to be managed by the farmers themselves.

“The overall policy for financing irrigation development is that it occurs with minimum government subsidy,” reads the national irrigation document.

The schemes will be located on public land and government will then hand them over to legally recognised small holder irrigation farmers’ groups, preferably cooperatives or associations.

But government will not totally separate itself from the activities in the schemes. Apart from providing agricultural advisors, government will also explore ways of securing credit for farmers through the establishment and growth of savings and credit cooperatives and village banks.

Markets

The Civil Society Agricultural Network (Cisanet) says the green belt project could be a lasting support for Malawi’s fragile economy.

However, Cisanet is worried about marketing. The agricultural boom of the past four years has exposed problems for farmers seeking markets for their produce. Although government has set the prices at which traders should buy farm produce, crops such as tobacco, maize and cotton have failed on the market, leading to some farmers to decide not to grow the crops this season.

Speaking in an interview with IPS after Mutharika was awarded the 2009 Driver of Change Award, Professor Richard Mkandawire, head of agriculture at the New Partnership for Africa Development, said where subsidies have been applied for small scale farmers, the farmers have not had adequate access to markets.

Bumper harvests have not led in a straight line to reducing poverty.

Mkandawire cautioned African governments over “the dangers of romanticizing the role of small holder farmers in their quest to end poverty and hunger reduction.”

“Fertiliser and seed subsidies that have over the years been extended to small scale farmers have failed to take them into a market economy. Rather, the subsidies have simply cushioned their poverty. There is a clear danger of simply patronising poverty instead of reducing it,” he said.

Mauwa admits Malawi struggles with markets but she says the construction of the green belt programme has taken on board economic experts from the private sector and from the departments of transport and trade to develop a relevant plan.

She says government is evaluating setting up marketing and processing Boards. The boards could initially be established by government but later privatised.

On the other hand, the department of irrigation will be providing farmers with training in how to effectively negotiate better prices for agricultural commodities.

The ministry will also encourage larger estate farms to assume a coordinating role in storage, processing and marketing of farm produce.

By Charles Mpaka
LIMBE, Malawi, Nov 4 2009 (IPS)

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.

But this is just another day in the life of the Genti brothers.

In search of a better life they travelled with their mother from their home in Nsanje, about 100km from Limbe, southern Malawi.

The brothers started begging on the streets of Limbe long before their mother, a blind beggar, died two years ago. They have grown up out here. They have never been to school and as things stand, they have no option of ever going.

Because while the Genti brothers eke out an existence living by their wits and the charity of strangers, the government is too busy to help children like them as it accuses its regional social welfare department of not doing enough to supplement the pittance it provides it each month.

The 400 dollars government allocates the Nsanje social welfare department is meant to provide care for over 40,000 children in the area.

If the Genti brothers had opted to return home to Nsanje after their mother passed on, they most probably would not have had a better life.

The ministry of gender, children and community development has social welfare offices in all 28 districts in Malawi. Their job is to look after children in need of education. They also provide clothes, food, a home and justice.

In a country of more than one million orphaned and vulnerable children, the relevance of the social welfare offices is not a matter for debate. But there are questions why some of the social welfare offices are among the most desperate of government offices.

Nsanje District social welfare office, for example, has registered more than 40,000 children in need of help. It receives 400 dollars a month from government to pay for water and electricity bills, buy stationery and fuel (which costs more than one dollar per litre) for its old vehicle and two motorcycles.

But that is not all. The 400 dollars has to also stretch further to organise child welfare-related activities such as social functions, youth clubs, HIV/AIDS awareness and rehabilitation services across the district.

The office asked government for 21,000 dollars to pay schools fees and cater for the additional educational needs of the children it looks after. It received only a quarter of that amount. As a result, more than a hundred children are unable to continue school.

Cyrus Jeke, spokesperson for the ministry of gender, children and community development, admits that government funding to the social welfare offices is not enough. But he puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of the district social welfare offices for not taking initiatives to find support elsewhere.

"The social welfare offices are funded directly by the treasury, and as a department we are aware of the shortfalls in the district offices, because there is a lot of work to do. But the social welfare offices are also allowed to source money from donors. They are supposed to compile their own proposals and get funding from organisations such as the National AIDS Commission and others.

"So, yes they are getting little from the treasury and we are concerned about it as a ministry. But other district offices are not complaining because they are innovative, and take initiatives to get support. Government money is not the only money there is for the social welfare offices," says Jeke.

The Nsanje District social welfare office tells IPS it has been sending out proposals to different organisations, but had received no response so far.

"We are talking about a place where there are such terrible cultural aspects, where villagers tell you they have stopped certain dangerous practices, yet do them behind your back. The situation is difficult here," says district social welfare officer Richard Mzondola.

Unlike other districts that boast several non-governmental organisations working solely on child issues alongside the social welfare offices, Nsanje has no such organisation. This is partly because of difficult access to the district, due to the poor road network, blistering temperatures, and mosquitoes – all of which make Nsanje a difficult place in which to stay.

Nsanje is battered by widespread floods almost every year Malawi gets good rains. In the mid-1980s Nsanje was home to more than 200,000 Mozambican refugees fleeing civil strife. They outnumbered the population of the district.

Nsanje is a disturbed place. The child welfare office reports that cases of child prostitution, destitution and trafficking are increasing in the district, but the office does not have much muscle to fight these evils.

"With the few resources we get, it is hard for us to say we are anywhere near winning the war against child problems in Nsanje," says Mzondola.

HIV/AIDS prevalence is 14 percent in Nsanje, 2 percent higher than the national rate. It was at 19 percent when the national rate was 14 percent three years ago. The high HIV/AIDS infection rate in Nsanje is largely attributed to traditional cultural practices, mostly sexual. Pregnancy, death, fire accidents and birth are often accompanied by sex rituals as rites of passage, or cleansing tools.

For instance, there are people in Nsanje who earn a living as sexual cleansers. They are hired by families to perform sexual acts with, say, a woman whose husband has died.

It is thought that a widow becomes "unclean" after the death of her husband – and remains so until she has intercourse with a sexual cleanser, or "namandwa". The sexual cleanser can stay with a widow for as long as the family arranges it. When the family is satisfied, the man leaves taking home a payment of up to 35 dollars after a month of service.

This practice is one of the leading causes of HIV/AIDS in the district and this fact has influenced government to include it among the cultural practices a proposed law seeks to criminalise.

But until that legislation is in place, the practice remains a major reason Nsanje is one of the districts in Malawi with the highest HIV/AIDS-related mortalities, leading to an increasing number of children being orphaned.

That is why in recent years, according to Mzondola, Nsanje district town has seen an influx of children patronising beer-drinking dives, video show centres and sleeping in the open in the marketplace. Most of the children are between eight and 14, and the social welfare office is overwhelmed.

"These children are our responsibility, but we are heavily under-resourced to manage. Without any other organisation working on children here, it means the responsibility rests entirely on this office. A significant push to our means would help a great deal. At the moment we are far from being up to the task," Mzondola says.

Maxwell Matewere, executive director of child rights organisation Eye of the Child, says he is baffled with the way the government allocates resources to social welfare offices.

Research the organisation conducted three years ago on resource allocation for child welfare activities showed that government was spending more resources in district offices that already had a number of non-governmental organisations working in the area.

"These other districts that government is pouring money (into) have donors. They are (the) target areas of many organisations. Government should have been taking that into account, and in that way districts like Nsanje, that have a greater need but are starved of resources, would have been well-equipped to deal with their many child-welfare cases," says Matewere.

If government was sincere in its professed commitment to address child problems in rural areas, Nsanje should have been on the priority list.

"With no other organisation working in Nsanje, the children’s hope there lies in the district social welfare office, which as things stand cannot give them hope, because the office is short on the means to do so," he says.

And he is not the only one who knows this. The Genti brothers know too. If they were to return to Nsanje, they instinctively know there would be no help for them.

"Why don’t you go back home in Nsanje now that your mother is dead, and you don’t have anyone around here to look after you?" asks IPS.

"There is no one to look after us there," replies 12-year-old Thomson Genti.

Excerpt:

By Charles Mpaka
BLANTYRE, Oct 26 2009 (IPS)

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.

Vendors at the Lizulu market say they do not know how government spends its money but they know it certainly will not reach them. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

This, Kandodo said, is in line with the Millennium Development Goal to eradicate extreme poverty by 2015. Value adding is a key component in improving lives of Malawians, 80 percent of whom earn a living through small scale farming, he explained.

It is why government packaged a loan facility in the budget for farmers, especially rural women, to access capital to invest in food processing, said the minister in his July budget presentation.

Heard it all before

Now, it is not the first time that Muonanji, an active member of the village development committee and secretary of a local HIV/AIDS club, has heard about such "good statements" during the national budget sessions.

But she does not think that her business depends on it to grow.

"I have heard about budgets before, the good things that they say but I don’t care because I don’t know where those good things go. It does not make a difference," she told as she rushed to join the vendors swarming around another bus.

Every year, before national budget presentations, the ministry of finance goes around the country seeking contributions from various players which include private businesses, churches and economic and human rights organisations on what they would like to see in their budget.

"Where do the consultations happen? Not at a place like this one. Ask these people (fellow vendors) and they will tell you they have never participated in such a discussion," she said.

She may not be at the consultation sessions but democracy ensures that she is represented by some civil society organisations (CSOs) during the consultations and by her member of parliament during discussion of the budget in the national assembly.

Such organisations have been compiling their own manifesto to try to press upon the government what the public would need to have in terms of education, water services, health and agriculture. They have also had their suggestions about what the national budget should contain in line with expectations of ordinary people they represent.

However, once they have made the pre-budget inputs, the organisations do not have control even on their own suggestions because they do not participate in the key discussion of the budget in parliament, said economic analyst Mavuto Bamusi.

"We do make contributions about what the people of Malawi want to have in the budget. But we are often not part of the process of discussing the contributions in parliament during budget sessions which is a key stage in budget development," he said.

Bamusi appreciates that in a democracy, by law members of parliament should be the ones to discuss the budget bill and make it into law in parliament. But he wishes the representatives were able to push through to have people’s requests reflected in the final budget product.

Bamusi, who is also national coordinator of the Human Rights Consultative Committee (HRCC), a grouping of over 50 human rights organisations in Malawi, says if anything it is the desire of civil society organisations to be part of the process of scrutinising allocations to different sectors to see whether the allocations are in line with the demands of citizens.

"We do submit our reports to a parliamentary committee on budget and financing. But often they have been sources of little change to the debate over national budget discussion in parliament. I would say that windows are not open wide enough for us to be recognised at that point yet," he said.

Citizens! Know your place

The deputy minister of finance, Fraser Nihorya, said it was not possible for civil society to participate in budget discussion in parliament because that was the duty of the legislators.

But he said the national budget tries to be as representative as possible through welcoming contributions from individuals and groups not only during pre-budget consultations but at anytime throughout the year.

"What we present during budget session is an aggregate of views from various players. We analyse the views, working together with multi-sectoral partners such as the IMF and World Bank.

"But remember that in the end, we have to take a position as government in accordance with the agenda for development and the resources available," he said.

Asked whether citizens, through civil society organisations, are allowed to monitor how the money that reaches the Debt and Aid department in the finance ministry is factored into the national budget, Nihorya said the ministry is a public place and therefore accountable to its citizens.

"The ministry is open to share information. We appreciate the views that we get because we think the checks and balances that we are provided with are to the advantage of the office and of the nation as well. But it should be expected that we cannot divulge all the information," he said

There are a few sessions that are held on information sharing between government departments and other outside players in a year. But not all information that civil society would desire to have is given, such as on how the five state houses spend the money allocated to them.

An official at the HRCC who did not want to be named blamed civil society for their inability to be able to monitor the Debt and Aid department and the general operations around the budget.

"Civil society is also supposed to monitor that donors are keeping to the Paris Declaration on donor commitment and conditions and aid effectiveness. They are also supposed to make a local revenue audit. But there is not much that is happening in this regard. We often confine ourselves to consultations or to petitioning parliament when the budget is not being passed quickly," the source said.

Bamusi admitted there were lapses on the part of civil society in Malawi when tackling the budget development and implementation. He attributed it to lack of capacity in many organisations.

"Issues of budget are complex matters and we are limited on capacity to provide thorough tracking," said Bamusi.

He added that there was need for CSOs in Malawi to broaden their scope of budget monitoring to include issues of water, funding to governance institutions and operations of local assemblies instead of concentrating on key sectors such as health, education and agriculture.

But he squarely blamed it on government as well for not been forthcoming on some matters.

"We often ask tough questions and that often puts us on a collision course with government. Angry with us, some officials have told us that we do not understand the psychology of government. In other cases, they tell us that they cannot give us information for fear of compromising state security and we think that is a blanket excuse," he said.

Reforms to strengthen accountability

He acknowledged however that recently government has been responding silently to some of the concerns from the CSOs. It has strengthened the offices of the auditor general and of public procurement which, according to Bamusi, should lead to prudent use of public finances.

In his budget presentation last July, the minister of finance said government was developing a five-year programme of public finance and economic management reform.

The programme was expected to, among other things, improve domestic and donor resource management, promote effective and efficient procurement and improve financial reporting and quality and timeliness of auditing processes.

While government is making such promises, ordinary people are waiting for the results to trickle down to them.

Muonanji said she did not believe in promises from politicians. Told that she could benefit from the youth loan facility or the Malawi Rural Development Fund (MARDEF) that has helped other women, Muonanji was not convinced.

"I have heard about MARDEF before on radios. But I would like to know who from this area is benefiting? All these women here have been selling tomatoes in small baskets for a long time and they too want to grow.

"And when that money comes here at all, we know that it is not going to get down to us," she said at Lizulu market in the Central region of Malawi.

Excerpt:

By Charles Mpaka
LILONGWE, Oct 21 2009 (IPS)

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.

Margaret Roka Mauwa, the deputy Minister of Agriculture in Malawi, says she believes in working with the media. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

It is a common practice, but one Mauwa refused to follow. Instead, she promised her voters what she knew she would be able to deliver

And as the deputy minister of agriculture, in a country that once was forced to import food, and now has a surplus of crops that it exports throughout the world, Mauwa has proved her point.

Mauwa believes that in a democracy, it is important for politicians to tell people the truth. In that way, you avoid misunderstandings with the constituents and you participate well in making democracy grow, she says.

But she is painfully aware that however hard she tries, she may not escape from the critical eye of the media, especially because she is also deputy minister of agriculture. Agriculture has recently become one of Malawi’s main source of income.

She likes the media because, she says, they are partners in shaping Malawi’s political system and help public servants to inform the nation about what their government is doing.

However, she has also learnt that the media can be disappointing.

"I have noticed that often journalists wait until something is wrong and they come to you. Sometimes they bring provocative questions, may be with bad intentions (to put the officials in bad light as being inefficient). That is why you see arrogance on the part of some of the politicians when dealing with journalists," Mauwa says.

Mauwa is proof of the development of democracy in Malawi.

Malwai’s president, Bingu wa Mutharika, is also the active minister of agriculture. And Mauwa, a female, is second in command in a department that has won Mutharika praises around the world for Malawi’s improved food security situation.

She is among the 42 female MPs that made it to parliament in the elections. Of the 193 members that were elected to the national assembly in the May 2009 elections, 145 were new people. Mauwa was one of the new faces.

For the first time in the history of multiparty politics in Malawi, people did not vote for political parties and candidates because of the region from which the leadership of the parties came.

Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP), one of the prominent civil society organisations in Malawi, says one of the outstanding features of Malawi’s democracy to- date has been that voters have turned the corner from choosing people just because they have been around in politics for a long time and because they belonged to a certain region or political party.

"This recent election has shown how grown up Malawian voters are becoming. They are electing people based on issues," says Christopher Chisoni, National Coordinator for CCJP.

The elections beat many bookmakers’ expectations. It was not expected that Mutharika and his party would win with a landslide. It was also not expected that Malawians would go for as many new faces in parliament.

"Citizens have come of age and politicians know now that voters can no longer be taken for granted. We have reached a stage where even ordinary Malawians are able to speak out loudly on issues that are affecting them," says Chisoni.

CCJP gives thumbs-up to the media, among other key players, for keeping public servants on their toes. According to the organisation, Malawian media has been questioning the performance of public individuals and making them accountable to the people that elected them.

There are many such cases of this. A former minister is currently in jail after a newspaper revealed that he had spent public money on a wedding of his daughter.

And an investigation is reportedly going at the country’s communications regulator after a newspaper investigation uncovered corrupt practices in awarding of mobile licences. The minister involved is Patricia Kaliati, minister of gender, women and community development.

The public officers have also been relying on the media to account to the nation about what is being done by, for example, publishing information like country’s progress and shortfalls on reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

But the organisation observes that in the name of being seen to be doing a good job, some public officials are "exploiting the poverty" of some media to meet personal public relations matters rather than to bring worth to public debate and move development agenda for Malawi.

Not all media houses in Malawi are very profitable and not all journalists are well paid. There have been claims that some public officials give money to journalists so they can publish only the good about them.

However, there are some media houses that protect the independence of the fourth estate and have carried articles faulting public officials for failing to tackle real issues in their areas.

"As civil society, we are not interested in public figures who want the media when they are donating 20 balls to some barefoot young men in their village. That sounds like raising a personal profile. We want them to use the media in a way that adds value to national debate on our politics and development," says Chisoni.

Executive Director for Media Council of Malawi (MCM) Baldwin Chiyamwaka says the media, which played a crucial role in bringing democracy in Malawi in 1993 through publishing diverse views in favour of change, has been facilitating the growth of that democracy by being a place where people discuss failings and successes of the process and of those meant to drive it.

"The media has been there with us every step on the way. As an emerging democracy, Malawi will continue to rely on the media as a tool to make public servants answerable to the people because that is a sure way of making our democracy strong," he said.

On whether the media in Malawi are too hard on public officials, Chiyamwaka said that at times, journalists have expected too much from politicians, even when they are new and without adequate information on parliament. He said this has resulted in indifferent treatment of journalists by some politicians.

"Sometimes, in our hunger for news we seem to forget that politicians are human beings too. They experience what we experience. They have failings like us. They are not special machines to be producing miracles all the time. So, on occasions, it would pay to give them time. It would be worthwhile to put our pens down on them and look elsewhere where we can get better quality news," Chiyamwaka said.

However, the authorities should not always expect the papers to be carrying positive stories only. He says it is the nature of the media to tackle both positive as well as the negative stories even if the public officials will not like it.

On her part, Mauwa said that the troubles that some Malawian MPs find themselves in are self-made.

A musician-cum-MP stirred anger among the people in his area when in his contribution in parliament last August, he complained that the music he had composed had been pirated. His constituents were angry with him, saying when he was campaigning, he did not say that he would fighting against music piracy but that he would be building bridges and schools in his area.

But in Mauwa’s campaign for the elections, she told her voters that she would not tell them what she would not be able to do just for the sake of getting votes.

"I told them that my job as their Member of Parliament would be to facilitate development. I did not promise to buy coffins for whoever dies in the area because I knew that I would not do it and that it was not the job of an MP.

"Because I told them what they would expect from me, there is a good understanding between us so far. I think that in a democracy, it is important to tell people the truth," she says.

Kaliati, minister of gender, women and community development, has held various cabinet portfolios since 2004. Since then she has been an MP and was one of few female MP survivors in the recent election.

One of the few public officials readily accessible to media in Malawi, Kaliati says her strength has been to be approachable to everyone.

"My policy is to be there for anyone, rich or poor, the media. Democracy is about being with people. That has helped me to know my weaknesses and strengths and I think that is useful for our growing democracy," she says.

Kaliati, who was minister of information before the elections in May, says media in Malawi has, however, been irritating with "their lack of judgement on what to publish and not to publish."

She has been in the papers herself several times for wrong reasons including corruption allegations and fights with ordinary women she is claimed to have suspected to be going out with her husband, a business man in her home town. (Kaliati is the minister involved in the corruption scandal with the country’s communications regulator which is currently under investigation.)

"The greatest challenge that we have in our democracy is poverty and that is also affecting the way you people report. You concentrate on reporting on issues in urban areas because that is where people who can bribe you are found. These are only the people that will see the sense in democracy. You are leaving out issues in rural areas and people there cannot see any change," she argues. CCJP is wary that most new, energetic and accessible representatives like Mauwa and Kaliati are now in a majority government.

According to CCJP, what has not ticked with Malawi’s emerging democracy is that demands from citizens are often sabotaged by political power.

"Citizens have often called upon government to explain on poor social service delivery in sectors such as health, education and water development but government has not been forthcoming. The fear of CCJP as a representative of citizens is that a majority government would be as defiant as was the case with a majority opposition in the past five years," says Chisoni.

MCM hopes though that the media in Malawi, in spite of the capacity and legislation problems that they face, will continue to play their role in bringing the MPs back to their constituents and to the service of the nation.

"That is the duty of the media, to make democracy grow and work for the people, to give people a continuous voice until somebody hears it," Chiyamwaka says.

Excerpt:

By Charles Mpaka
LILONGWE, Oct 9 2009 (IPS)

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

A Malawian sex worker who says she was forced by police to undergo an HIV test. Credit: Charles Mpaka

The forceful HIV testing of the sex workers was a violation of the women’s rights, human rights organisations say. But Malawian police have claimed that it was nothing more than just a routine part of their of job.

But human rights organisations in Malawi want the police to answer a few vital questions about the circumstances surrounding the women’s HIV tests.

Early this month, in a routine sweep for criminals, police in the southern region of Malawi combed the town of Mwanza, one of the two busiest border posts through which Malawi receives and sends large volumes of cargo.

In the exercise, which netted 91 offenders, the law enforcers also arrested 14 sex workers. Police say the women were found loitering around the town.

“They (arresting officers) said they were looking for men,” police spokesperson Dave Chingwalu told IPS.

The sex workers were charged and fined 8 dollars each. According to Chingwalu, they were not charged for loitering but for deliberately trading in sex while having a sexually transmitted disease. Police charged them with the crime after the results of their HIV tests came back positive.

“We released them and they should be back on the streets now,” said the police spokesperson.

Laws in Malawi provides for an offence in rogue and vagabond. The Penal Code also prohibits living on earnings of prostitution by both men and women. It also prohibits the keeping of brothels for the purpose of prostitution. There is no law that specifically criminalises sex work.

However, the police have been using these pieces of legislation to rein in sex work in the major cities of the country.

In this incident, it was the testing of the women for HIV that has outraged some human rights organisations in Malawi. After the 14 women were found HIV positive, a story to that effect was published in the local media. No names of the women were published.

A Mwanza hospital official was quoted as having confirmed that he conducted the tests on the women and that all of them were found HIV positive.

Asked whether the women had consented to getting tested, Chingwalu said the police took for them for the examination after discussing it with them.

But human rights organisations involved in the matter say police forced the women to undergo the HIV tests without their consent. This, rights organisations say can be challenged in court because it is unconstitutional.

They argued that the Malawi Constitution does not permit that any person be subjected to medical or scientific experimentation without their consent.

“In the matter under consideration, consent was not sought from the 14 women. On that basis alone, the HIV testing is inconsistent with the Constitution and therefore invalid,” said the Centre for Development of People (Cedep), an organisation that works to empower minority groups in Malawi.

But the police are adamant they have done nothing wrong.

“It was part of our investigations,” said Chingwalu. “We do that in various other cases such as defilement. When somebody has defiled another person, we have to take the defiler for a HIV test or any other sexually transmitted disease for us to be able to establish the extent of our case.”

He said the police had acted legally according to the Penal Code. Section 192 of the code reads: “Any person who unlawfully or negligently does any act which is and which he knows or has reason to believe to be likely to spread the infection of any disease dangerous to life shall be guilty of a misdemeanour.”

IPS could not trace the affected sex workers but another woman who went through the experience a week earlier in Malawi’s former capital city of Zomba said that in that raid, the police forced her and other sex workers to undergo an HIV test.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the woman said when they were rounded up, the police took away their cellular phones and money.

“Sometimes, when they catch you in these raids, they force you into sex and once you provide that, you get released. Otherwise, they keep you in custody and take you to court,” she claimed.

But this last time things were different. She claims she was made to undergo an HIV test against her will.

“It’s not that we agreed to go for a test. They did not ask us whether we wanted to go for the test or not. The way I understand it, this HIV testing voluntary in Malawi but they force us into it because that is the only way they can justify their illegal actions on us,” said the sex worker who is HIV positive. She discovered her status in 2005 but she still continues working.

Undule Mwakasungula of the Centre for Human Rights and Rehabilitation (CHRR) said the police action in this case was discriminatory and it underlined the thinking that women are the ones responsible for spreading HIV/Aids.

“If it’s a way of dealing with HIV/Aids, then they should find another way. HIV testing is based on consent. If you force the sex workers into the test, it is unlikely that there is any counselling that is done on them. In that way, they can’t realise the importance of getting tested. I find the action by the police discriminatory and uncalled for,” he said.

Gift Trapence of Cedep equally condemned the action by the police saying it is a violation of the sex workers’ right to privacy and equality and amounted to a mental torture to them.

“This is stigma and we are against it,” said Trapence.

Asked how they have wanted the police to handle the women during the raid, the organisations said prosecuting them under the rogue and vagabond offence would have been more acceptable.

The CHRR added Malawi needed to revise some of its laws that were impinging on individual human rights.

Dr Mary Shawa, Secretary for HIV/Aids and Nutrition in the Office of the President and Cabinet, said while Malawi had to employ every available and legitimate way to contain HIV/Aids, testing the sex workers alone, and not their clients as well, was not justice enough.

She said the HIV infections rates among sex workers in Malawi were high, ranging between 70 and 80 percent. This, she said, was one of the findings of a study that her department conducted in all the 28 districts in Malawi.

“As you can see the infection rate, the image of sex work is not good. It may also mean that this is the rate of infection among the purchasers of sex as well,” she said.

Shawa also pointed out that while the prostitutes had rights, their clients also had rights – the right to life.

“We all know the importance of human rights. But when we are demanding our rights, we also have to keep in mind our responsibilities. It is the sex workers’ right to make money but if we are all careful, we will not make that money at the expense of another person’s right to life,” Shawa said.

She added that it was high time sex workers in Malawi were organised so that they are empowered to be part of the solution to HIV/Aids in Malawi instead of being part of the problem.

In 2007, a special law commission proposed mandatory HIV testing for sex workers in Malawi. It was one measure in the campaign against HIV/Aids that causes an estimated 100,000 deaths annually in Malawi, according to official records.

But human rights organisations such as Cedep were up in arms against the proposed law. They argued that apart from being discriminatory, the law would not yield intended objectives because there are various pieces of legislations that are conflicting on the definition of sex work.

These opposing laws are sorely in need of clarity if anything can be done about the spread of HIV/Aids by sex workers in Malawi.

“The authorities tell us that sex work is illegal. The penal code does not say anything about sex work. So what do they mean when they say that sex workers must go for mandatory testing? Are they saying that they are accepting sex work now?” wondered Trapence.

Excerpt: