Abortion is illegal in Uganda. Girls who get pregnant resort to deadly backstreet abortion providers. However, it is also criminal to provide safe abortion services. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

By Wambi Michael
KAMPALA, Aug 18 2025 (IPS)

Sarah Namukisa nearly missed her final year exams earlier this year. She was subjected to a mandatory pregnancy test—the 25-year-old student at the Medical Laboratory Training School in Jinja was then expelled because she was pregnant.

While Namukisa’s case sparked public criticism, activists say it was by no means an isolated incident.

Across Uganda and other East African countries, pregnant students continue to face expulsion, forced school dropout, and stigma in both public and private educational institutions.

Labila Sumaya Musoke, from the Initiative for Social and Economic Rights (ISER), told IPS that the widespread practice reflects deep-seated systemic discrimination and patriarchal control over young women’s bodies and futures

She said the expulsion mirrors systemic and institutional discrimination that international and regional human rights bodies have explicitly deemed unlawful and incompatible with human rights standards.

Namukisa was lucky that her case attracted the attention of the civil society and Uganda’s Equal Opportunities Commission. The commission ordered her school to rescind the expulsion. Many young women resort to deadly “backstreet” abortions in an effort to find ways to return to school or higher learning institutes. Abortion is still outlawed in Uganda and its neighbors—Kenya and Tanzania.

The most recent Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) datasets of the 12 East African countries found that the overall prevalence of adolescent pregnancy in East Africa was 54.6 percent. The survey concluded that it is vital to design public health interventions targeting higher-risk adolescent girls, particularly those from the poorest households, by enhancing maternal education and empowerment to reduce adolescent pregnancy and its complications.

Teenage pregnancy and motherhood rate in Kenya stands at 18 percent. This implies that about one in every five teenage girls between the ages of 15-19 years has either had a live birth or is pregnant with their first child.

The rate of teenage pregnancy has stagnated for over a decade in Uganda; it stood at 25 percent in 2006, at 24 percent in 2011 and now shows trends of rising at 25 percent. Teenage pregnancy in Tanzania is a significant public health issue, with 22 percent of women aged 15-19 having been pregnant, according to a 2022 Tanzania Demographic and Health Survey.

Rosemary Kirui, the Legal Advisor at the Center for Reproductive Rights—which works in seven countries, including Uganda—said the enjoyment of the Sexual Reproductive Health rights has been limited by barriers related to the legal and policy framework.

“We have a legal environment that has restrictive laws that criminalize some SHRH services. Most of the laws were adopted or inherited from the colonialists. And most of the countries have not changed the laws. So you will find that the penal code is similar, giving a blanket criminalization of abortion. So you will find this is being interpreted narrowly in many African countries,” said Kirui.

She told IPS that the other aspect of restrictive laws is the age of consent, where there is a mandatory third-party requirement for adolescents seeking information and sexual reproduction health services.

Primer Kwagala, a Ugandan Lawyer whose organization, Women Pro Bono Initiative (WPI), has been litigating for access to SHR services, told IPS that the country maintains restrictions on abortion.

“We are saying that 16 women are dying each day due to lack of services in public health facilities. And there are those who are dying in communities due to unsafe abortion. We have on our law books outdated colonial policies preventing health workers from providing life-saving services.”

Uganda’s constitution says that no one can take the life of an unborn child except in exceptional circumstances.

“For many women to exercise autonomy over their bodies and to say, ‘I cannot carry this pregnancy; I need an abortion,’ they cannot go ahead and have that discussion. The first thing the health worker will say is, ‘I don’t want to go to prison,’” said Kwagala.

The Ministry of Health in Uganda has issued guidelines allowing safe abortions in cases of defilement, rape, and incest. But the guidelines, according to Kwagala, are more on paper than in practice.

In 2020, a ruling by the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACERWC) against the Republic of Tanzania found that Tanzania’s policy of expelling pregnant schoolgirls constituted a violation of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, particularly the rights to education, health, dignity, and non-discrimination.

Six girls who were pregnant were expelled from the school. The committee urged Tanzania to reform its education policies.

Dr. Godfrey Kangaude, an expert on Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights based in Malawi, said there is a tussle between the gatekeepers who think the SHR issues are for the civil society to handle.

“But I think this is closest to us. Sex and reproduction are relevant to everyone,” said Kangaude while speaking to the East Africa Law Society on litigating for sexual health rights.

He said sexual and reproductive justice is closely interrelated with finance and labor justice and generally the overall well-being of humans.

Kagaunde explained that in Malawi and other countries in the region, there are anomalies when it comes to the age of consent.

“In Malawi, the law says an adult cannot have sex with a child. Okay, we want to protect children. Isn’t it? But the line has been so rigid that an 18-year-old boy can’t have sex with a 17-year-old girl, because a 17-year-old is a minor and an 18-year-old is an adult. We understand that we want to protect people from harmful sexual conduct, especially children, but the law shouldn’t just be arbitrary. It should take into account that the 17-year-old and 18-year-old are peers.”

Criminalization of Consensual Sex 

Kangaunde and others argue that rights-based reform is needed. Laws should be gender-neutral, orientation-neutral, and distinguish exploitative adult–child sex from non-exploitative peer sex. Kangaude points to alternatives like multi-stage consent and close-in-age (“Romeo & Juliet”) exemptions.

Kangaunde and others have been criticized over their stance on the age of consent to sex and access for individuals younger than 18 to access contraceptives and safe abortion services.

“But look, there is a 19-year-old boy who is being charged with the offense of having sex with a girlfriend of 17. I mean, for him, life just went crazy. He is at school, and he had to stop schooling,” said Kangaude, the director at Nyale Institute. His institute provides legal support and engages in strategic litigation to protect and promote sexual and reproductive health rights.

Activists have since 2017 been pushing for a regional Sexual Reproductive Health Rights law. They contend that across East Africa, sexual and reproductive health rights have been narrowly defined as standalone rights.

If enacted, it would require the EAC member states to harmonize provisions on sexual and reproductive health services and information.

The bill has, however, faced significant resistance based especially on social and cultural barriers. The resistance has focused on aspects of comprehensive sex education for teenagers and provisions regarding legal abortion.

Dr. Tom Mulisa, a human rights and constitutional law researcher based at the University of Rwanda, told IPS that sexual and reproductive health rights are broad.

“Constitutions have those rights, and national health laws and policies have those rights, we are talking about the right to health, which most constitutions have, and we are talking about the right to privacy, the right to information, and sexual and reproductive health rights,” he said.

The partner states have ratified the Maputo protocol, which allows for the termination of pregnancy. The protocol is the main regional instrument that advances women’s rights especially sexual and reproductive health rights. The protocol also provides for elimination of discrimination and prohibition of harmful practices, such as female genital cutting.

Within the region, some countries have ratified the protocol, others have not and others have ratified it with reservations. Enforcement of the protocol has been split, making it difficult for all to enjoy the broader rights therein.

Kenya made reservations about Article (14), which provides for safe and legal abortion. Kenya’s constitution, on the other hand, provides for a right to legal and safe abortion when the life of the mother or fetus is at threat.

Learning From Advances in Rwanda

Rwanda has made significant progress in improving the sexual and reproductive health (SRH) of its population, especially young individuals. Like many countries in the region, it had post-colonial laws. It embarked on reform since 2009. The reforms laid the groundwork for what many describe as a flexible system.

Earlier this month, Rwanda’s Parliament passed a new law granting adolescent girls the right to access Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) services—particularly family planning—without requiring parental consent. It lowered the legal age to access contraceptives from 18-15.

Mulisa stated that the country modified its new penal code by eliminating the court’s requirement for an abortion. The penal code also included sexual reproductive health rights.

“Previously, the government held the right to health, while individuals were obligated to comply with it. But now the constitution has an explicit right to health,” revealed Mulisa, the founder of the Great Lakes Initiative For Human Rights and Development, which does public interest litigation in Rwanda.

It is now a crime under the penal code in Rwanda if a woman is denied access to contraceptives. And there are fewer restrictions on safe abortion following the removal of the court order requirement.

Rwanda’s ministerial order on abortion defines the right to health more broadly, incorporating the scope outlined by the WHO.

According to the WHO, the right to health includes four essential, interrelated elements: availability, accessibility, acceptability, and quality.

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Malawi’s Vice President, Michael Bizwick Usi, addressing reporters during a press briefing at the Third UN Conference on Landlocked Developing Countries. Credit: Kizito Makoye/IPS

By Kizito Makoye
AWAZA, Turkmenistan , Aug 6 2025 (IPS)

“The term ‘negotiation’ must be understood in ethical context… When an arsonist comes and burns down my house and then asks me to negotiate so I can rebuild my house, that becomes the paradox.”

With these searing words, Malawi’s Vice President Michael Bizwick Usi cut through the diplomatic pleasantries at a high-level conference of Landlocked Developing Countries (LLDCs), laying bare the deep frustration felt by many vulnerable nations battling climate change’s harshest impacts.

Farmers in southern Malawi are still nursing the wounds left by Cyclone Freddy, thousands of kilometres away from the glass-and-marble plenary halls in Awaza—Turkmenistan’s glitzy Caspian Sea resort where LLDC leaders are gathered this week. The 2023 storm, one of the worst in the region’s history, ravaged homes, washed away crops, and pushed an already fragile economy deeper into crisis.

Set against the shimmering backdrop of opulent hotels and air-conditioned meeting rooms, the conference has placed climate change high on the agenda. But Usi’s emotionally charged remarks served as a reminder that for many LLDCs, the climate emergency is not a theoretical threat—it is a lived reality, with each passing season bringing more destruction.

“Many times, we go as a bloc and ask for general assistance. Some of the packages are not really relevant to the causes in those specific areas,” Usi added, urging world leaders to recognise the moral dimensions of climate negotiations.

Usi’s comments came as African LLDCs, including Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Chad, Burundi and Burkina Faso, celebrated the historic establishment of the Group of LLDCs as a formal negotiating bloc under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This move is not just symbolic. It marks a long-overdue recognition of the specific vulnerabilities faced by these nations—and the need for tailored climate finance, adaptation support, and international cooperation.

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

A Turning Point for the Forgotten

The formation of the LLDC Group under the UNFCCC was described by Rabaab Fatima, UN Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for LLDCs, as “a critical step toward ensuring that the specific vulnerabilities and unique challenges of the LLDCs are reflected in global climate decision-making.”

Fatima added, “This achievement reflects the power of unity, leadership and resilience. It sends a clear signal that LLDCs will play a greater role in global climate negotiations. This gives us the means to effectively articulate and address the unique climate challenge that we all face today.”

Despite representing only 7 percent of the global population, LLDCs accounted for 18 percent of the world’s population affected by droughts and landslides between 2012 and 2023. With 55 percent of their populations relying on agriculture—compared to the global average of 25 percent—these nations are on the frontline of climate impacts, yet they often sit on the periphery of climate financing and technology transfer mechanisms.

The Ethical Dimension of Negotiation

In an interview with IPS, Usi challenged the moral framing of climate negotiations: “Do Bhutan and Malawi have the same issues and problems? Are we negotiating on a fair platform?” His comments cut to the heart of a decades-long grievance. LLDCs are hit hard by disasters they did not cause and lack the resources to respond.

His call for an ethical rethinking of climate negotiations resonated with others on the panel. Dina Nath Dhungyel, Bhutan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and External trade emphasized, “If you really want to fight climate change, each and every country must take responsibility.”

Bhutan, which has over 70 percent of its land under forest cover and is constitutionally mandated to maintain at least 60 percent, has long been a beacon of sustainability.

Still, as Dhungyel pointed out, even countries with exemplary green records cannot shoulder the burden alone.

“It may not be possible for a small nation like Bhutan… to mitigate climate change throughout the world,” he warned.

Tailoring Support to the Vulnerable

Historically, LLDCs have been lumped together with other developing nations in broad climate categories. This has led to the under-representation of many of their unique concerns, including fragile transit routes, dependence on drought-prone hydropower, and desertification.

The newly formed LLDC Group will help correct this by pushing for:

• Dedicated climate finance
• Priority access to technology transfer
• Support for resilient infrastructure
• Recognition in loss and damage frameworks
• Targeted capacity building

In 2023, more than 51 percent of LLDC populations faced moderate or severe food insecurity. Hydropower, which provides 44 percent of their electricity, is increasingly threatened by erratic weather. These structural dependencies demand targeted solutions.

Climate Finance: A Shrinking Pie

The battle for climate finance remains fierce. Chairman Pacheco of the LLDC Group acknowledged the complexity.

“Everybody’s competing. The pie size is not getting bigger… One more additional group has now been added to be asking for a slice of the pie. It’s not gonna be easy.”

Yet, Fatima argued, the LLDCs’ distinct voice is not only legitimate but also necessary. Her office is working to gather evidence and advocate for their rightful claim to resources: “We’ll try to mobilise the UN system as a whole… so that your unique climate challenges are also reflected in their priorities and programmes.”

From Recognition to Action

This momentum builds on Article 4.8(i) of the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement, which recognise the special needs of LLDCs. Yet until now, these provisions lacked institutional muscle. The LLDC negotiating group aims to bridge that gap.

The recently adopted Awaza Programme of Action for 2024-2034 identifies climate change as a top priority and outlines support mechanisms in adaptation, disaster risk reduction, and resilient infrastructure. It calls for systematic partnerships and tailored responses.

The inclusion of LLDCs in the formal UNFCCC process not only amplifies their voice but also enables cross-regional solidarity. Many LLDCs belong simultaneously to the G77+China, the African Group, and the Least Developed Countries bloc. As Pacheco noted, the strategy is to build consensus and gain broader support for LLDC priorities through these interlinked networks.

Hope in the Rubble.

But news of the LLDC bloc reaching the negotiating table gives her a sliver of hope. “If the world can see us, maybe they will help,” she says. “We don’t want to live on handouts. We want to build again.”

For millions of farmers in Malawi and across Africa, the world must listen—and act.

As the world heads toward COP30, the LLDCs are no longer silent. They have a seat at the table—and they intend to use it.

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Women are often exploited when buying fish from fishers or traders in lake Malawi. Credit: Benson Kunchezera/IPS

By Benson Kunchezera
LILONGWE, May 22 2025 (IPS)

Women in fishing communities in Malawi’s lakeshore districts of Nkhotakota and Mangochi are frequently targets of sexual exploitation for fish, a practice commonly known as ‘sex for fish.’ A recent report by the Malawi Human Rights Commission (MHRC) has unearthed disturbing accounts of women being coerced into transactional sex to access fish from male boat owners, exposing a widespread violation of their rights.

The MHRC inquiry, which focused on fishing hubs along Lake Malawi, reveals how deeply entrenched the practice is, with minimal intervention from authorities to address the systemic abuse. According to the report, the lack of targeted policies and enforcement mechanisms within fishing communities has created an environment where women are vulnerable to sexual exploitation and left without recourse when faced with unwanted pregnancies or abuse.

“The women are often left to shoulder the burden alone, while the men deny responsibility for the pregnancies or disappear altogether,” reads part of the report. “There is a need for coordinated efforts to end these abuses and protect women who are vital players in the fish trade.”

One of the women who shared her story is 42-year-old Joyce Issa, a seasoned fish trader from Mangochi. Having been in the business for over 15 years, Joyce recounts how she was coerced into sex several times just to be able to purchase fish.

“There were times when the only way to buy fish was by giving in to their demands,” Joyce told IPS. “It was humiliating, but the pressure to feed my family and keep my business running left me with no choice.”

Issa adds that scarcity of fish has worsened the situation, as competition among traders grows. “Business is much slower than in previous years. Fish is difficult to come by, and when it is available, the prices are high—and for women, the price often includes sex,” she explained.

However, she acknowledged that the situation has seen some slight improvements recently, particularly due to the efforts of the HeForShe campaign—a global solidarity movement for gender equality that has begun to gain ground in the region.

“The HeForShe initiative has helped in reducing some of these abuses. Now we can report cases, and there are people who will follow up,” Joyce added.

Authorities Respond

Laston Chikopa, the Assistant Gender Officer for Mangochi district, confirms that “sex for fish” is a well-known and persistent issue in the area. He says their office is working closely with local fishermen and community members to encourage reporting and protect women involved in the trade.

“In Mangochi alone, we receive over 15 cases annually of women being denied access to fish because they refused to engage in sexual acts with the fishermen,” Chikopa said. “These figures are likely just the tip of the iceberg since many cases go unreported due to fear of retaliation or stigma.

To combat the problem, the district gender office has introduced confidential reporting mechanisms, including two toll-free numbers—116 and 5600—that victims can use to report abuse or discrimination.

“These lines allow victims to share their experiences discreetly, and we work with law enforcement and other stakeholders to ensure justice is served,” Chikopa emphasized.

MHRC to Monitor Action

The MHRC report highlights the problem and proposes concrete steps forward. The Commission plans to engage relevant authorities, including the Malawi Police Service, to investigate the findings and take immediate action against the perpetrators.

“After three months, we will review how well the relevant authorities have responded to the inquiry,” the Commission’s report states. “If there’s no visible progress, we will escalate the matter to ensure accountability.”

The MHRC also recommends that the government and its partners develop gender-sensitive policies that specifically address the vulnerabilities of women in fishing communities. These include the creation of women-led fishing cooperatives, alternative economic opportunities, and public awareness campaigns that denounce gender-based exploitation.

A Broader Issue

The “sex for fish” phenomenon is not unique to Malawi. Similar cases have been reported across various parts of sub-Saharan Africa, especially around major lakes where fishing is a dominant economic activity. However, Malawi’s case underscores the urgency of addressing the structural imbalances that leave women at the mercy of more powerful men in resource-dependent communities.

“This is about power and survival,” said a local gender rights activist in Mangochi, who asked to remain anonymous. “When women lack bargaining power and the state fails to protect them, these abuses become normalized.”

The activist called on the government to ensure that policies are not just written but also enforced. “We need more women in leadership roles within these communities, and we need the law to work for them.”

Hope Amid Hardship

Despite the grim realities, stories like Issa’s offer a glimmer of hope. Women are increasingly speaking out, and initiatives like HeForShe are beginning to create safe spaces for dialogue and action. With increased public attention and stronger institutional backing, there is growing momentum to dismantle the system that has for too long exploited the vulnerability of women in Malawi’s fishing communities.

But as the MHRC emphasized, real change will require sustained commitment—from local leaders, law enforcement, policymakers, and the communities themselves. Only then can the women of the lakeshore truly reclaim their dignity and safety.

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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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A field of maize spoiled by drought in Zambia, one of the countries that has declared an emergency as it grapples with the effects of El Niño. Credit: WFP/Gabriela Vivacqua

By Kevin Humphrey
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Jul 23 2024 (IPS)

Heading into the traditional dry period of winter in southern Africa, there was significant consternation due to the drastically below average rainfall the region has been experiencing since January 2024.

Countries, including Botswana, Mozambique, Angola, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia, have only received less than 20 percent of the rainfall that they usually receive in the month of February. The driest January/February period in 40 years, according to a report issued by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Agriculture in these large areas of southern Africa has been seriously affected, as farming is rainfall-dependent with no access to irrigation systems.

Edward Phiri cooking mealies (maize) on an open fire at his vegetable stall in a busy street in Windsor West, Johannesburg. Edward, mentioned how expensive mealies had become in the last few months and that he was the only vegetable stall selling cooked maize. All the other stalls (at least 15 in a small but densely populated area) had closed down due to high costs. Credit: Kevin Humphrey/IPS

Machinda Marongwe, programme director of Oxfam Southern Africa, said the region is “in crisis” and called on donors to “immediately release resources” to prevent an “unimaginable humanitarian situation.”

“With all these countries facing multiple crises simultaneously, the urgency cannot be overstated,” Marongwe said.

In southern Africa, a region Oxfam describes as a “climate disaster hotspot,” El Nino, the climate pattern that originates along the equator in the Pacific Ocean, has severely influenced the weather in the region. A feature of El Nino is that it brings high temperatures and low rainfall to southern Africa. This dries out the ground, causing floods when it does rain.

Professor Jasper Knight of the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at Wits University spoke to IPS about the current extreme weather conditions.

A prolonged dry spell in southern Africa in early 2024 scorched crops and threatened food security for millions of people. The ongoing El Nino, which altered rainfall patterns during the growing season, has played a significant role in fueling the drought. Credit: NASA

“We are in an oscillating period of El Nino, and this causes variability in regional rainfall across southern Africa. Some parts of the region are very dry and have experienced heat waves; parts of southern Lesotho are currently in a crisis state of drought, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFRC),” says Knight.

“But this water crisis isn’t just about rainfall; it is also about managing water more effectively when it is already scarce. The water infrastructure in southern Africa is not fit for purpose and this makes the situation worse. Developing more resilient infrastructure will help buffer some of the negative effects of rainfall variability. This in turn will help society cope with drought events.”

In addition to the problem of raising crops, which has led to very real risks of food insecurity, a lack of water has ushered in widespread outbreaks of cholera. The rainy season misfired and became a drought and the fact that the next wet season is months away increases fears for the region as a whole in terms of the provision of food and the effects on people’s lives economically and in terms of dangerous health threats.

According to the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), southern Africa is in the grip of an urgent crisis.

FANRPAN stated in a recent media briefing that “the situation is dire and demands immediate attention. Widespread crop failure looms in Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Livestock are dying at alarming rates due to a lack of water and vegetation.

“The movement of desperate people and animals is spreading diseases, including those transmissible to humans.”

A drought disaster was declared in Zambia on February 29 and Malawi’s president followed suit on March 23—for the fourth year in a row that weather conditions have led the country to do this. 

The World Food Programme (WFP) said El Niño was “exacerbating the devastating effects of the climate crisis in Malawi.” Zimbabwe joined them in early April.

Reuters reported Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa as saying, “More than 2.7 million people in the country will go hungry this year and more than USD 2 billion in aid is required for the country’s national response.”

Joe Glauber, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), spoke to IPS.

“This year’s El Nino-related production shortfalls are partially offset by larger carrying stocks following large maize crops in 2022 and 2023.  Poor crops have already resulted in increased imports in countries like Zimbabwe. Exports are expected to fall as stocks tighten in the region. The coming La Niña will hopefully bring needed precipitation to the region later this year, which should mean that the drought-related shortages are relatively short-lived.”

After heating up the eastern Pacific Ocean for about a year, El Niño finally died out in May 2024. As of July 2024, the eastern Pacific was in a neutral phase, but the reprieve may be short-lived. Credit: NASA

This hopeful forecast is also mentioned in a blog published, on April 10, 2024, by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Entitled “Southern Africa drought: Impacts on maize Production,” Joseph Glauber and Weston Anderson wrote: “Unlike 2014 to 2016, when key producer-exporter South Africa suffered back-to-back droughts, this year’s drought follows a year of good harvest and stock building. Larger beginning stocks will help buffer the impact of the current drought. However, supplies from outside the region will be necessary to meet consumption needs, and exports will likely decline, particularly to markets outside of Southern Africa.”

Drought and the attendant extreme hardships that it causes are undoubtedly creating havoc in the region. Hopefully, food stocks from countries like South Africa will go some way to alleviating this crisis and that this coming spring, there will be ample rain and bumper crops.

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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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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.

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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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Youths like Feston Zale from Chileka area in Blantyre district of Malawi’s Southern Region are finding employment and a source of income in agribusiness. Credit: Esmie Komwa Eneya/IPS

By Esmie Komwa Eneya
BLANTYRE, Malawi , Mar 10 2021 (IPS)

After getting tired of searching for employment for seven years, Feston Zale from Chileka area in Malawi’s Southern Region decided to venture into agribusiness.

He started thinking of how to change the wetland he inherited from his parents into a horticultural farm. So he joined the Chileka Horticultural Cooperative to learn the basics.

“I started cultivating the piece of land tirelessly hoping that one day the proceeds from it would wipe away my tears of unemployment.

“The money I got from the first harvest was so satisfying and it gave me the courage to  expand my farming business,” Zale, who grows cabbage, onions and tomatoes, told IPS.

Zale has been able to make more than $4,000 per year. With the profit from his agribusiness he has managed to open a shop and buy a car. In comparison, most small family farms in generate a gross annual income of about $1,840, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO).

“I have received several awards for producing very quality horticultural crops such as cabbage, onions and tomatoes,” he said.

Master Kapalamula is an agri-entrepreneur from Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe. He told IPS that venturing into agribusiness has provided him with a way to support himself since he completed his studies two years ago.

“Mainly, I’m into tomato production and my last crop has fetched me around $550.

“I have used some of the money to buy a sewing machine for fashion and design business,” he told IPS.

Though Kapalamula is still searching for employment, he says he will not give up his agribusiness once he finds a job and instead wants to balance both. He also has plans to expand his agribusiness.

Zale and Kapalamula were fortunate to find a means of income through agribuisness. This southern African nation’s youth unemployment is currently at 23 percent, according to the ministry of labour. Malawi, has a population of 16.8 million.

Though Zale and Kapalamula point out that the industry has its share of challenges.

One major problem, they say, is the low prices they get for their produce due to the smuggling of similar commodities from neighbouring countries and a lack of market regulations.

Because there are no policies that help safeguard the prices and sale of agricultural commodities in the country, people practice free trade and the market is flooded. This means that farmers are forced to reduce their prices in order to make some sales.

“If we force ourselves to lower our prices further, we end up making losses hence we do not benefit a lot from the business as we were supposed to,” said Kapalamula.

“To remain in the business, one needs to be courageous enough otherwise I have seen other youths quitting the business,” said Kapalamula.

Feston Zale from Chileka area in Blantyre district of Malawi’s Southern Region has changed the wetland he inherited from his parents into a horticultural farm. He is pictured here withsome of his prize-winning cabbages. Credit: Esmie Komwa Eneya/IPS

According to experts at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), policy making processes must be supported by research.

It is one of the reasons why the Enhancing Capacity to Apply Research Evidence (CARE) in Policy for Youth Engagement in Agribusiness and Rural Economic Activities in Africa project was established. The CARE project seeks to enhance the understanding of the poverty reduction and employment impact, and the factors influencing youth engagement in agribusiness and rural farm and non-farm economy. The project is sponsored by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and managed by IITA.

According to findings of a CARE study in Malawi conducted by CARE awardee Dingase Kanchu Mkandawire, finding reliable markets for agricultural commodities is one of the deterrents of youth employment in agribusiness. 

“Youth agri-entrepreneurs face lack of access to the market and poor road networks worsen the situation,” Mkandawire told IPS.

Indeed, during the launch of the 2019/2020 annual review and planning meeting conducted by the Department of Agriculture Research Services (DARS) at Bvumbwe Research Station in Thyolo District, Malawi’s Minister of Agriculture Lobin Lowe pointed that research in agriculture has a gap if it only focuses on production.

“The habit of focusing research on how to increase productivity only has left farmers stranded since after producing, marketing [their products] becomes a bigger challenge for them,” said Lowe.

Aubrey Jolex is another CARE awardee who conducted research on the use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in agribusiness. He found that intensifying the use of ICT helped youth in agribusiness find reliable markets, among other benefits.

“Since the youth are heavy users of the ICT tools, they use those tools they use for communication to market their produce which in turn helps them to identify reliable markets,” he told IPS.

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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. 

Malawi’s small scale traders selling their merchandise at Limbe market in Blantyre. Credit: Lameck Masina/IPS

By Lameck Masina
BLANTYRE, Malawi, Jun 11 2020 (IPS)

Malawi remains one of the few nations in the world that has not gone into a coronavirus lockdown as the government rushes to meet the conditions of a court order to implement a cash transfer scheme for the poor before doing so. But as some parts of the world are slowing coming out of their lockdowns, it could be likely this southern African nation won’t go into one as the rerun of the country’s presidential election nears. 

On Apr. 27, President Peter Mutharika announced the roll out of a multimillion dollar emergency cash transfer exercise aimed to cushion the peri urban poor from the impact of the coronavirus.

Mutharika said the $51 million bailout initiative targeted 172,000 households in the cities of Lilongwe, Blantyre, Mzuzu and Zomba.

The exercise, which was expected to roll out in May, was in response to demands from civil rights organisations, who obtained a court injunction against a planned 21-day lockdown scheduled to start Apr. 18, outlining the lack of measures to cushion the country’s vulnerable. The court ruled the cash transfer scheme be implemented and a lockdown would be suspended until then.

Under the World Bank-funded programme, beneficiaries will receive MK35, 000 (about $47) a month, for six months.

Country’s vulnerable still waiting

Widow Elizabeth Longwe has been earning her daily income by selling tomatoes at Limbe market in Blantyre. But since the country confirmed its first case of coronavirus on Apr. 2, her daily sales have reduced by almost half.

Her customers stopped purchasing from her for fear of contracting the virus, which has killed over 400,000 people across the globe.

“Instead, people started buying things in bulk and using them sparingly, making it difficult for small scale businesses like mine to enjoy the same kind of sales one would do on a normal day,” she tells IPS.

The mother of three says she “thanks God” that her lack of sales came after the government suspended schools in response to the pandemic.

“It would have been a disaster to me because I couldn’t have managed to provide transport money for my two older children to school daily. But still, my worry was how I would manage to feed my children,” she says.

But she had been hopeful for financial assistance when the cash transfer scheme was been announced.

So too was Lackson Tembo, who trades in second-hand clothes, also at Limbe Market.

“This was a relief to me because with this meant I would still be feeding my children. I would be able to buy soap for washing and bathing. I would be able to pay my monthly rent,” Tembo tells IPS.

Where is the money?

But Tembo and Longwe, who are among the first beneficiaries listed for the cash transfers, are yet to receive the money. And they have not been informed why. They fear that remarks by the country’s Vice President Saulos Chilima, who said at a political rally in May that donors have withheld the funds for fear of abuse, may in fact be true.

However, spokesperson for the Treasury Department in the Ministry of Finance Williams Banda tells IPS that the funds are there but disbursement is delayed because they have been working on “implementation modalities”.

“The World Bank was targeting the peri-urban hotspots of the major cities … [but] when the technical committee looked at the list, they noted that the targeted beneficiaries [vulnerable groups] were not on the lists,” says Banda.

Banda says this forced the technical committee to suspend the listing and start engaging with “the ones who do the normal social cash transfer, to get to those who are indeed vulnerable and very poor individuals in the peri-urban hot spots”.

Lockdown versus elections

However, many still doubt if the lockdown will ever take off as political leaders intensify their campaign rallies ahead of the country’s presidential re-run, expected to be held on Jul 2.

• Malawi is expected to go polls after the Constitutional Court nullified the country’s May 21, 2019 presidential elections citing massive and systematic irregularities, including the use of correctional fluid on the ballots. 
• In its verdict on February 3, the court ordered fresh polls within 150 days, which ends on July 3. Parliament, which is currently sitting in the capital Lilongwe, is expected to set a date for the fresh polls.

But at a political rally on Saturday, Jun. 6, in the Zomba City in southern Malawi, former President Joyce Banda accused the government of exaggerating figures of COVID-19 cases.

Malawi has so far confirmed 455 COVID-19 cases with 4 deaths and 55 recoveries. 

“Since April, we have only registered four deaths, and recently we saw the government faking people suffering from the coronavirus, to find an excuse to postpone the election through a lockdown, but still, more are recovering.

“Let’s just thank God that we have been spared from this pandemic rather than deliberately bloating cases to attract donor money,” she had said.

Her remarks were an echo of what other opposition leaders have been saying; that the government should forget imposing a lockdown as Malawians are eager to go to polls.

Cash transfer to start soon … but what of COVID-19 testing?

While it is uncertain if the country will ever go into a lockdown, Minister of Population Planning and Social Welfare Clara Makungwa tells IPS that with or without the lockdown, the emergency cash transfer will still roll out because of the increasing number of people impacted by COVID-19. This includes migrant workers who are returning home, as well as those who are unable to run their businesses as people implement their own social distancing measures here.

“Figures for those affected are getting bigger and bigger now. For example we have 17 busses coming soon with people [migrant workers who were stranded in South Africa because of the lockdown there] who are coming back home, they are helpless. Those that have businesses are suffering. They are not enjoying the usual business as they were doing before. These people still need assistance,” she tells IPS. 

Makungwa says some of the issues which delayed the roll out of the programme have been resolved and expectation is that the exercise would start by the end of this month.

“We needed to train the enumerators, brief the block leaders because they are the ones to benefit and also work with city councils.  So we have come that far and we are now ready for the enumerators to go round doing the enlisting and the programme will roll out,” says Makungwa.

However a lecturer in economics at Malawi Polytechnic, Betcheni Tchereni, tells IPS that although the cash transfer would help mitigate the impact of the virus on the poor, efforts to contain the spread of the virus should also be funded.

“The best thing that we should do is procure enough testing kits and make sure that pretty much everybody has been tested. That way then it will be alright and make sure that porous borders have been closed. Because you have seen that most of the people have been affected or infected because of someone who travelled from abroad,” Tchereni tells IPS.

Malawi with a population of about 18 million has just tested 13 COVID-19 testing sites according to the Public Health Institution of Malawi. About 6,000 people have far been tested.

Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, just doesn’t have the financial resources to combat human trafficking. With 50 percent of this country’s 18 million people living below the poverty line, many are susceptible to the crime of trafficking. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By Charity Chimungu Phiri
BLANTYRE, Malawi , May 13 2020 (IPS)

Malawi is not doing enough to enforce its laws on human trafficking, resulting in a number of cases against perpetrators being dismissed by the courts, according to a local rights group. But local officials say that this Southern African nation — one of the poorest countries in the world — just doesn’t have the financial resources to do so.

• The 2015 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Act criminalises sex and labour trafficking, with up to 14 years imprisonment for offences involving an adult victim, and up to 21 years imprisonment for offences involving a child.
•  The TIP Act mandated the creation of a Trafficking in Persons Fund (TIPF), to financially support victims with aid, counselling and seeking justice.
•  In addition, Malawi has set up a National Coordination Committee Against Trafficking in Persons (NCCATIP) and developed a National Plan of Action Against Trafficking in Persons (2017-2022).

No funds to help trafficking victims

Caleb Thole, the national coordinator of the Malawi Network Against Trafficking (MNAT), a coalition of NGOs, told IPS that they are concerned that the TIPF was empty and not enough assistance was being given to victims.

“When we’re rescuing victims they need to be fed, transported and kept in a shelter, but there are literally no funds in the TIPF, the government cannot show you any…there aren’t even shelter homes to provide safety for victims,” he said.

However, senior deputy secretary for Homeland Security and the national coordinator for NCCATIP, Patricia Liabuba, told IPS that government funding to TIPF has increased, but acknowledged there were financial shortfalls.

“Government funding from 2017 has increased gradually from $66,000 to $200,000 in 2019. It is an undisputed fact that trafficking in person issues are multi-sectoral in nature and that the key challenge is insufficient funds to provide shelter and protection services for the victims,” she told IPS. 

Liabuba acknowledged the government was, by law, responsible for “repatriating victims and reintegrating them with the community as well as international victims”.

• Between 2016 and 2018, the Malawian government, with support from international agencies, repatriated over 80 girls who were trafficked to Kuwait under the pretence of gainful employment.
• In 2016, authorities said they needed about $17,300 to bring home 28 girls who were destitute in Kuwait after their employers took away their passports.

Some victims make their own way home

Modestar* was one of those young Malawian women who had been stranded overseas. She had left her home in Zalewa, a town in Malawi’s southern region for Kurdistan in northern Iraq, some 5,400 miles away, after being promised a well-paying job looking after the elderly.

But the salary she had been promised was slashed in half, and her phone and passport was confiscated upon her arrival. She was forced to work long hours caring for an elderly patient in a private home.

“I was not allowed to go outside of the compound. I worked long hours, at times from 7am to 1am [the next day], without getting paid,” she told IPS.

• The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ), which actively supports the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 8 of decent work and economic growth, has focused much of its work on eliminating modern slavery.  GSN has been focusing efforts to create a global movement of change and a list of recommendations aimed at employers states, among other things, that there should be; no withholding of passports and IDs, wages should be directly paid into employees’ bank accounts, their living conditions must be safe and they must be guaranteed freedom of movement.

Eventually she was rescued by Iraqi police who had been tipped off by another woman who had also been in domestic service with Modestar. But the women soon realised they may not be able to return home, as the employment agent refused to return their passports.

“It took the police threatening to shut down their agency for them to agree to let us go; so they went and cancelled our visas and gave us our money and we left,” she recalled.

She had been fortunate that the ‘agent’ had agreed to pay her return airfare — but it was only as far as Johannesburg, South Africa.

While the TIPF is meant for repatriation, there had been no funding available for her. Instead, MNAT stepped in cover the costs her journey from Johannesburg back to Malawi. 

Most cases of trafficking are local

Liabuba pointed out that in Malawi, most women and girls are trafficked from rural areas “to work as prostitutes in urban centres and to foreign countries for forced labour, prostitution and sexual exploitation”.

Thole confirmed this: “The country registers between 15 and 20 cases daily nationwide, mostly from border districts such as Phalombe, Mulanje, and Thyolo. Cases are also reported due to cross border businesses with countries like Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa and also to countries such as Kuwait and the Arab Emirates seeking job opportunities.”

• The International Monetary Fund estimates that 50 percent of this country’s 18 million people live below the poverty line. Youth unemployment, according to World Bank estimates as of April 2020, stands at 7.5 percent.

Are trafficking criminals are being charged correctly?

Liabuba said that in 2019 the country had recorded 142 trafficking victims, with 32 suspected traffickers charged.

“Following the prosecution and successful trial, 16 of the 32 suspects were convicted and four were discharged and the other 12 are being tried in different courts across the country,” Liabuba said.

Malawi’s Police Service had slightly different figures, stating that in 2019 140 victims of human trafficking where rescued, of which 65 were children.

Malawi Police Services’ public relations officer James Kadadzera told IPS that out of these cases, 48 suspects were arrested, prosecuted and are serving different jail sentences.

“Out of the 48 convicts the longest term was given to one who is serving 12 years imprisonment with hard labour; he was arrested in Phalombe on his way to Mozambique with six boys,” said Kadadzera.

But Thole said MNAT was concerned that many cases ended up being dismissed and that perpetrators are being fined for their crimes — which is against the law — instead of being given jail sentences.

“Convicts who are supposed to be jailed are being released on fines, with some getting light sentences. There’re some agencies which cannot even be questioned as to what sort of activities they’re operating in the country…law enforcement agencies don’t even fully understand the law and how it is supposed to be interpreted,” Thole told IPS.

Last year, Malawi was downgraded to a Tier 2 watchlist country by the United States Department of State. A Tier 2 country, means that while the country does not comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking, they are making significant attempts to do so.  

According to a U.S. Department of State report on trafficking in Malawi, the “government did not investigate or hold any complicit officials criminally accountable despite these credible allegations and several past cases of Malawian diplomats, police, health, and immigration officials engaged in trafficking abroad. The government did not report referring or otherwise providing protective services to any trafficking victims”.

Educate people about trafficking and create more jobs

But Kadadzera called for intensive civic education on trafficking, especially for young women and girls, who are disproportionately affected by the crime. 

“Just last week a young lady approached us privately saying she was having doubts about a certain gentleman who claimed to be an agent who could help her get health care work in the United Kingdom. She had already paid the man [about $650] which she has since gotten back and swears not to get carried away again,” he said.

The U.N’s International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Malawi is one of the agencies working with the government to combat human trafficking.

• It supported the government develop the National Plan of Action Against Trafficking in Persons, conducted capacity-building activities against trafficking and aided with resource mobilisation to strengthen the trafficking fund, among other things.

“However, more needs to be done in creating services that increase employment opportunities and reduction of poverty among at-risk population,” said IOM Chief Commissioner Mpilo Nkomo.

Modestar is a case in point. While funding from the TIPF had not been available to her, upon her return home, MNAT provided her with capital, which she used to start a small business selling clothing and cosmetics.   

But Liabuba acknowledged that the government needed to do more in its fight against trafficking.

“The Malawi government should do more to lobby with donor partners for resources for construction of shelters and direct assistance to victims of trafficking…enhance capacity for law enforcers, judicial officers, the National Coordination Committee and protection officers…and develop more nationwide educational programmes targeting mainly women and children,” she said.

But Thole told IPS there was lack of political will to eliminate human trafficking in Malawi.

“We need structures, systems and financial resources in place to support the fight against trafficking in persons in Malawi. Other countries like the U.S. have put stringent measures in place to deal with trafficking for example banning visas for domestic workers for Malawian diplomats. We’re currently we’re on Tier 2 on the watch list which means we’re slowly moving into Tier 3, which is the worst,” Thole said.

* Name changed to protect her identity. 

** Writing with Nalisha Adams in Bonn.

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.

Excerpt:

Judith Twaili shows where she used to dry the fish catch when business was better. Credit: Mabvuto Banda/IPS

By Mabvuto Banda
MANGOCHI, Malawi, Dec 21 2018 (IPS)

Lake Malawi, Africa’s third largest lake, provides an economic lifeline to many fishing families. But overfishing is affecting many of these lives, with women being affected the most.

The lake, also known as Lake Nyasa in Tanzania and Lago Niassa in Mozambique, has the largest number of endemic fish species in the world — 90 percent out of the almost 1,000 species of fish in the lake can’t be found anywhere else in the world.

The Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development estimates that fishing contributes about four percent to Malawi’s gross domestic product (GDP), and that it employs about 300,000 people.

However, that is probably not the case now because fish stocks in the lake have been dwindling over the years due to over-fishing and women are the hardest hit.

Judith Kananji’s life-changing story tells it all. Kananji who is from a fishing family in Micesi Village Traditional Authority Mponda, in the lakeshore district of Mangochi, says she has in the meantime stopped purchasing fish because the trade is no longer lucrative compared to in previous years.

“The problem is that the fish is no longer found in abundance and it’s only the small fish available at the moment and it’s expensive. Unlike before we were having bigger fish which was easy to make profits. This time around it is hard to purchase small fish to sell at a higher price,” she told IPS.

“About 8 years ago, I used to make a good profit from capital of about MK100, 000 (137 dollars). But now it is even impossible to make profits with a working capital of MK800, 000 (1,095 dollars),” she said.

According to the Southern African Development Community (SADC), protocol report, “Years ago, it was the norm to catch about 5,000 fish a day, but now, fishers catch about one-fifth of that, or even as less as a mere 300 fish a day.”

Kananji said that the increase of fishing vessels on the lake has negatively contributed to depleting fish levels because there is stiff competition among the fishermen, which is leading to overfishing.

But SADC also said, “The rapid drop in Lake Malawi’s water levels, driven by population growth, climate change and deforestation, is threatening its flora and fauna species with extinction.”

Kananji said: “Sadly it is us women who buy fish from fishermen who have been pushed out of business because fishermen in most cases raise their prices to meet operating costs whenever there is a small catch.”

“This works to our disadvantage because fish prices at the market are always low,” she added.

Just like Kananji, Chrissy Mbatata received a loan from a micro finance lending institution popularly known as village bank to bank roll her fish selling business.

Mbatata is, however, in more trouble. She is currently struggling to settle the loan.

“Initially it was easy for me to pay the loan and support my family because I was making good money. Now it is even hard to break even. Fish is not available and I don’t know where the money to pay back the loan and support my family will come from,” Mbatata told IPS.

The dwindling fish is not only affecting businesses but also the protein intake in a country where the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund says around 46 percent of children under five are stunted, 21 percent are underweight, and four percent are wasted and Micronutrient deficiencies are common.

“Chambo [the famous local fish] used to be the cheapest source of protein for us but now it’s now a luxury we only can afford at month-ends. Imagine a single fish going at K1 800 (2.4 dollars)?” said Angela Malajira, a widow of four from Lilongwe’s Area 23 suburb.

To reverse the trend government and fishing communities have found sustainable ways to harness the industry by setting up some rules and empower chiefs to implement them.

Every year, the government prohibits fishing on the lake from the month of November to December 31 to allow breeding to take place.

Interestingly this has been well received, without any resistance, from fishing communities because they understand the importance of increasing the fish levels in the lake.

Instead the communities have formulated their own bylaws outlawing fishing from November to March —  extending the fishing for 5 months.

Vice Chairperson for Makanjira Beach Village Committee Malufu Shaibu said the fishing communities agree that fishing on the lake should shut down for a long time because it has shown that the move can help to improve fish levels on lake.

He explained that during the past five months, assessment has shown that there are more fish species and volume that have started to be seen on the lake as opposed to when the lake was closed for two months
only.

“We want the lake to be closed for six months. We are glad that now we have a lot of fish due to the prolonged time of breeding which we gave the fish,” said Shaibu.

“Our children will now be able to see fish the way we saw them. The benefits for closing the lake for a long time are more than the disadvantage.”

But Shaibu, like Kananji, complained that commercial fishermen are derailing their efforts to improve fish stocks.

Mangochi District Fisheries Officer Thomas Nyasulu said that an office they are working with the newly revived Fisheries Association of Malawi to rein in on big commercial fishermen on the lake.
He said closing the lake for a long period of time would make their work more easy and fulfilling.

“It is good that the fishermen are suggesting this move. It can really help a lot. On regulating the commercial fishermen, we are working with fisheries association of Malawi in making sure that all big fishermen are following their fishing grounds,” said Nyasulu.

The bylaws are working. In April this year a 40-year-old man was convicted and sentenced to pay a fine of K800,000 (1,095 dollars) or in default serve 60 months imprisonment with hard labour for fishing on the lake when had closed contravening the  fisheries conservation and Management Act.

The Magistrate Court sentenced Kennedy Fatchi of Makawa Village in the area of Traditional Authority Mponda in the district after he pleaded guilty to the charges.

Police prosecutor Maxwell Mwaluka told the court that on March 4, 2018 the chiefs working with the Fisheries Inspectorate in the district came across a commercial fishing company on the lake fishing.

He said the team seized the fishing materials and the convict was charged with three counts which he pleaded guilty to.

“This is the only way we can go back to having more fish in our lake which would inadvertently improve our lives,” said Kananji.

A poultry farmer from Lumbwe village in Malawi hands her chickens to Lydia Katengeza to administer a vaccine against Newcastle Disease. Credit: Charles Mkoka/IPS

By Charles Mkoka
LILONGWE, Sep 27 2017 (IPS)

Lydia Katengeza, a community vaccinator with the Nathenje Community Vaccination Association (NCVA), wakes up as early as 5 a.m., ready with her I-2 vaccine vial in a storage container in her hand. She moves from one house to another, visiting each poultry farmer. All of them are alerted a day in advance so that they don’t release their free-range chickens in the morning.

The first farmer she visited when an IPS reporter accompanied her on her rounds was Maxwell Panganani, who owns 30 chickens. The whole flock was given the vaccine, which protects poultry from the deadly Newcastle Disease (ND) and costs four cents per chicken. This means Katengeza collected 1.24 dollars from this farmer.Raised by 80 percent of local farmers, poultry is the greatest contribution to household food and nutritional security of all livestock species in Malawi.

She moved on to other households: Makalani Kumapeni, whose 51 chickens were given the vaccine; Chipiliro Kanamwali with 11 chickens; Peter Lumbwe with 24 chickens; Zeze Lumbwe with 14 chickens, Frank Thamisoni with 12 chickens and Samuel Asipolo, who just owns one.

Raised by 80 percent of local farmers, poultry is the greatest contribution to household food and nutritional security of all livestock species in Malawi. Farmers use chickens during weddings, funerals and other rituals, and for sale or as gifts. They are also bartered for other products.

However, despite the important role that chickens play in supporting households in rural areas, there is a major constraint to the expansion and increased productivity of poultry – the frequent devastation of flocks, up to 90 percent, according to the Department of Animal Health and Livestock Development (DAHLD). This damage is caused by ND, which strikes during the hot, dry months of August through to November annually.

The virus presents primarily as an acute respiratory illness, and is one of the most serious of all avian diseases. It is also transmissible to humans.

“We were first trained as farmer field facilitators in 2014 under a CARE Malawi programme. Later CARE linked us with Inter Aide, a French organization that provided us training in the procedures of how to be a community vaccinator,” says Katengeza, who is also village head woman of Chizinga in Traditional Authority Kalumbu, Lilongwe district.

According to Katengeza, the knowledge and procedures learnt during vaccine administration have been of great benefit to her as a farmer. As a result of the training, her chickens no longer die of ND. And as a ripple effect, she has also managed to help her fellow farmers to overcome the disease.

“I now have 10 goats, harvested 70 50-kg bags of maize this year, moulded bricks and built a good house. I am also able to pay school fees for my kids. As a family, we have sustained access to proteins as body-building foods from chickens once slaughtered,” says Katengeza.

She said CARE and Inter Aide have changed her life and that of other farmers.

Another farmer, Eveless Makalani, with a flock of 51 birds, has worked with community vaccinators for some time. She learned about them during the farmer extension meetings they conduct in the village.

“My family gets help from these chickens, especially during funerals and weddings, but also in the event of problems. We sell some of them as they are in high demand on the market, unlike hybrids.”

Malakani adds that the money earned from selling one chicken pays for the vaccination of over 50 chickens from ND – making it a viable business.

Yolomosi Tifere, a male community vaccinator who serves farmers in the Nathenje area, said the project should be expanded to include other health supports.

“This vaccine is for ND fine and good. However, we also need other drugs to address bacteria, cough, intestinal worms so that these problems are also taken care of,” Tifere said in an interview during the field visit.

Graça Archer, Programme Officer for Inter Aide Newcastle Disease Control Programme, said each ND campaign is systematic and runs for four months.

“During the first month, community vaccinators go house to house to do poultry registration, like how many chickens to vaccinate, how many vials are needed. The second month is for the actual vaccination of the chickens and the fourth month is for review of the success and challenges.” Archer explained in an interview.

The peak of the campaign takes place in July because the risk of an outbreak is high. This is when farmers have more money and exchange more chickens and there is a greater probability for them to become infected with ND.

“There is more acceptance from the farmers in July than the two other campaigns. For instance, last year we vaccinated 590,800 chickens,” says Archer, who expressed concerns about the erratic supply of the drug from CVL.

In order to ensure sustainability of the programme, NCVA was formed to strengthen local participation in the fight against ND. Meanwhile, the Global Alliance for Livestock Veterinary Medicine is working in partnership with Inter Aide to improve the nutrition and livelihoods of smallholder livestock producers, and enhance family farm productivity and resilience in an increasingly changing climate.

“The I-2 vaccine is thermal tolerant demand driven, people see the benefit of vaccinating chickens so there is exponential growth for the vaccine need. However, production is not managed as an enterprise due to shortage of financing of the drug, hence its erratic availability,” Archer explained.

Gilson Njunga, Officer in Charge at the CVL, says they produce 3,000 bottles of the vaccine per month which translates to about a million dosages administered to chickens, as each bottle accommodates 300 chickens.

“Production of the vaccine vial is at 3,000 bottles monthly because we produce the vaccine within a diagnostic laboratory and not an independent vaccine lab. As such, the production process has to pass through quality control before being certified for use by farmers to ensure they are not contaminated,” Njunga told IPS.

Meanwhile, as a further step towards attaining food and nutritional security, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the Malawi Government agreed on a Country Programme Framework estimated at 24.3 million dollars. The rationale for the proposed CPF priority areas is derived from the analysis and the enabling environment for Food and Nutrition Security and Sustainable Agriculture.

The analysis demonstrates that while the country is making good progress in food security and staple crop production, it remains vulnerable to shocks – many climate-related – that impede increased agricultural production, productivity and profitability.

By Charity Chimungu Phiri
BLANTYRE, Malawi, Mar 29 2017 (IPS)

When building a house, it’s critical to lay a strong foundation. The same applies to education, with studies showing that children who attend early learning centers perform better in school than those who do not.

In Malawi, a 2003 national survey found that only 18.8 percent of school-age children with disabilities were attending class. More than twice as many of the same age group without disabilities (41.1 percent) attended school. This was mainly attributed to the lack of a disability-friendly environment."Since many children come from poor families, parents are often faced with the dilemma of choosing which child to send to secondary school, bearing in mind that the one with difficulties needs special care." --teacher Miriam Chimtengo

More parents are now sending their young ones to such special preschools, some as little as two years old. This kind of early intervention is especially critical for children with learning disabilities such as autism.

Most autistic children are diagnosed late in Malawi due to the lack of specialist doctors and caregivers, but also failure by their parents, guardians and teachers to recognize that the child has learning difficulties.

James Botolo* lives in one of the suburbs of Blantyre and has a 10-year-old autistic son named Chikondi*.

“For so long, we never could figure out what was wrong with our son. Of course he didn’t like to play with his siblings at home and times he could talk to himself but we never thought it was anything. But what mainly bothered us was that he never did well in school, so we kept moving him from one private school to another. One day I met someone who alerted me that my son could have a learning problem,” he said.

Autistic children often lack socialization skills, are hyperactive, struggle to pay attention and sometimes react to things by crying or hurting themselves.

Chikondi is now in standard two at the St. Pius X Resource Centre, a school for children with physical and developmental disabilities such as cerebral palsy, autism, dyslexia, epilepsy, hearing impairment, and blindness.

Currently in Malawi, there are over 40 resource learning centers for children with various disabilities.

Miriam Chimtengo, 41, is a specialist teacher at St. Pius X, where she teaches a class of about 27 students (16 full time).

Chimtengo, who holds a diploma in Special Needs Education, told IPS that there are major gaps in the social support system for the families of children with learning challenges.

“Even though we’re laying this good foundation for the children, for most of them their education does not go further. The parents bring the children to us here at primary school where they will start noticing the changes, but after the child finishes standard 8, they just keep them at home…so all this work at the grassroots level is not sustained.”

According to Chimtengo, there are limited resources for a child with learning difficulties to further their education.

“Since many children come from poor families, parents are often faced with the dilemma of choosing which child to send to secondary school, bearing in mind that the one with difficulties needs special care, special learning materials, full supervision and assistance, which might be hard to provide,” she said.

“Some parents also believe they can better take care of their child alone at home than at school where they will not be around to protect their child.”

Chimtengo said that those with physical disabilities such as visual impairments, deafness and limited limb mobility are more likely to go further in school than children with mental/emotional issues such as autism.

The other contributing factor is that there are no free services for poor families who wish to send their mentally challenged children to behavioral therapy. Only physiotherapy is free in government hospitals and at SOS Villages.

“For example, here in my class I have children whom upon assessment we recommended that they go for therapy, but only those parents who are financially better off have put up their kids in therapy…we have been lobbying with the government to make links with such specialists so that they are available for all children regardless of their financial standing,”

This scenario automatically puts a child with a learning disability at a disadvantage to later further their education or secure a job.

There are limited spaces offered to youth with disabilities in national vocational training schools in Malawi. They only take in a certain number, which is far below the actual population in need.

In other private vocational training facilities, the prerequisite for entry is a Malawi School Certificate of Education-MSCE (equivalent to a high school diploma), which many children with mental disabilities find hard to earn.

The Living Conditions study of 2013 found that many youths with various disabilities were frustrated with the large gap in the provision of vocational training services, as well as some other services such as welfare, assistive devices and counseling.

In 2015, the government launched a program called Community Technical Colleges aimed at helping poor children, including those with disabilities and lacking high school diplomas, gain access to tertiary education.

International experts on autism advise parents with learning difficulties to take a leading role to ensure that their child secures some form of employment.

The website Autism Speaks says it is important to encourage the child to network at community and family events to meet potential employers.

“Encourage your son or daughter to think about their hopes, dreams, interests and strengths as a way to start planning for employment. One of the most valuable resources for adults with autism is peer support and mentoring.”

The other challenge in educating children with special needs in Malawi is lack of specialists both in the education and health sectors. For the whole of the commercial capital Blantyre, there is only one neurological doctor who sees patients twice a week at the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital.

There are many special education teachers, but are scattered across the country.

“Literature says that one special needs teacher should attend to five kids. But because of the increase of children, we’re teaching more than that. This is challenging because different disabilities have different needs,” said Chimtengo, the special needs teacher at St Pius X.

“It means in one lesson I should try to capture all the needs of every student, which takes a lot of time and effort. Our colleagues in the normal classes teach a class, but for us we teach individuals who need to be taught the things repetitively. We call it repetition and drilling,” she said.

Excerpt:

Given Mbwira (left) and Obed Nkhoma on the internet, some of the people who will benefit from cheaper, affordable and faster Internet due to the WhiteSpaces Project. Photo taken at the offices of The Nation in Blantyre. Credit: Bobby Kabango/IPS

By Charity Chimungu Phiri
BLANTYRE, Nov 1 2016 (IPS)

This month, many Malawians, especially those in rural areas, will be able to start accessing the internet as easily as opening a tap to get water.

At least that’s the dream of C3, a communication services provider and the first commercial entity to deploy countrywide TV White Spaces-TVWS for a trial period of nine months.

Most Malawians live in rural areas. The majority of them are poor and only 6.5 percent are connected to the internet. To reach this population, C3 is building a new network that relies on unused frequencies in the television spectrum, called “TV white spaces”, with plans to extend it throughout the country.

The connectivity is then distributed to the user communities with a new, efficient and affordable last mile technology using TVWS and Dynamic Spectrum. Users then access the network via Wi-Fi.

“It’s a cheap and effective way of having internet,” said 17-year-old Elizabeth Kananji, a second year student at the Malawi Polytechnic.

“Not all people are able to access the net as they have to pay the service providers, which is a challenge with the high prices, but with TVWS you don’t have to pay as long as you have your gadgets. You’re good to go, which is amazing,” she told IPS.

Malawi has just concluded the TVWS technical trial project, a collaborative effort of the Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA), the Chancellor College physics department and Marconi Wireless Lab T/ ICT4D of Italy.

The project is aimed at promoting research and development in the field of ICT, according to MACRA’s Deputy Director of Spectrum Management, Jonathan Pinifolo.

The TVWS was piloted in Zomba in 2013 at St Mary’s Secondary School, the Malawi Defense Force’s Air wing, Pirimiti Rural Hospital and the Geological Survey Department.

Other countries that carried out similar pilot projects include U.S., United Kingdom, South Africa and Kenya. But Malawi will be the first country in the world to deploy TVWS nationwide.

The project has received praise worldwide, with the United Nations and the International Telecommunications Union saying it is a viable and cost-effective way to reach rural areas with internet services.

Globally, TVWS has provided an alternative means of providing internet to remote and underserved areas without using traditional internet spectrum (radio spectrum), which experts say is becoming congested.

In Malawi, C3 is the only company that has shown interest in running the project, according to MACRA.

“We are anticipating initial launch of some parts of the infrastructure in November, however, since we are not only looking at TVWS we are building towers, installing Wi-Fi hotspots, backhaul links, some of these will be ready before end November. We can then announce the official launch date,” C3’s Richard Chisala told IPS.

“We did research where we assessed all the internet service providers in Malawi and found out that internet is more expensive in Malawi than in Kenya, for example. This has resulted in only 10 percent of the population accessing the internet. This is mainly due to greed and inefficiency,” added C3’s CEO Chris Shaeke.

“So we want to change this…even our license from MACRA states that we have to focus on the rural areas.”

Shaeke says their service will be reliable and affordable: “Because there’s intermittent power supply in Malawi, we are running all our equipment on solar. In addition, we have set up our infrastructure where rural people can easily access the internet right where they are.”

Shaeke told IPS that they have partnered with the Malawi Posts Corporation (MPC) to allow people in rural areas access to the internet through their mailboxes. He says a person will just plug in their device and connect to the net as like people do when they want to get electricity or water, for example.

Currently, C3 is acquiring their infrastructure with funding from Microsoft, which also funded a similar project in Kenya.

“We’re getting financial and technical support from Microsoft…we’re a grant recipient of the Microsoft Affordable Access Initiative which aims to empower the billions of people worldwide who do not have affordable access to the internet,” said Chisala.

“We have a data centre in Lilongwe and a disaster recovery centre in Blantyre…these two will be the first data centres in Africa to provide what we call cloud services…we are an open access network.”

Cloud computing and storage solutions provide users and enterprises with various capabilities to store and process data in third party data centers that may be located far from users.

Among the agencies expected to utilise the C3 network are non-governmental organisations, ministries and department agencies, micro- and small or medium enterprises as wells as resellers.

One of the companies showing interest is Health Point Media. HPM plans to provide audio and visual messages to district hospitals and health centers. They will be installing displays (TV monitors) in all health centers in Malawi, according to the company’s head, Tapiwa Bandawe.

“We are targeting our messages to the 1.9 million people who visit these health facilities every month. Because the patient to health worker ratio is so high in Malawi (one to 10,000), it is difficult for the health personnel to spend time teaching people how they can prevent diseases, for example. So through our messages, people are able to learn while waiting to get help at the hospitals,” Bandawe told IPS.

Elizabeth Kananji, the student at Malawi Polytechnic, says she was inspired by the TVWS project to study Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering.

“I got acquainted with the project in 2013 when they came to my former school (St. Mary’s Secondary) to install antennas during the pilot phase. At first I wasn’t sure what to major in college but TVWS showed me how telecommunications can change the world,” she told IPS.

Pulses are good for nutrition and income, particularly for women farmers who look after household food security, like those shown here at a village outside Lusaka, Zambia. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
MASVINGO, Zimbabwe, Oct 12 2016 (IPS)

Elizabeth Mpofu is a fighter. She is one of a select group of farmers who equate food security with the war against hunger and shun poor agricultural practices which destroy the environment and impoverish farmers, especially women.

Mpofu grows maize, legumes and different beans on her environmentally-friendly 10-hectare farm in Masvingo Province, about 290 kms southeast of Zimbabwe’s capital Harare.“Pulses are the perfect food for Africa but their production is challenged by imperfect policies.” -- Charles Govati

Despite a region-wide drought in Southern Africa, she harvested 150 kg of dried beans this year. Although the number was still far less than what she harvests in a good season, dried peas and beans have armed farmers like Mpofu to battle food and nutritional insecurity at the household level.

The dried beans and peas belong to a class of food legumes known as pulses, widely considered a revolutionary food because of their many benefits. Pulses are rich in protein, drought resistant, offer an alternative cash crop and provide a fuel source. They are a perfect food in Africa, challenged by high rates of malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies, particularly among children under five years old.

The World Food Programme says the African region has the highest percentage of hungry population in the world, with one person in four undernourished, while over a third of children in Africa are stunted.

Celebrating the Year of Pulses

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) defines pulses as legumes with dry, edible seeds that have low fat content such as chickpeas, kidney beans, butter beans, black eyed peas, lentils, pigeon beans and cow peas among others.

Legumes used as vegetables such as green peas and beans or those used for oil extraction such as soybean and groundnuts are not classified as pulses.

“Pulses are the key to food security and nutrition in Africa, taking into consideration the climate crisis being faced on the continent,” Mpofu told IPS. “Pulses are providing a diversity of food for my family and also are important in improving soil health, especially in promoting an agroecology farming system.”

Pulses on display at a farmer’s market in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Pulses are power crops, offering nutritional and income security for farmers in Africa. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Mpofu, a member of the International Coordination Committee (ICC) and the General Coordinator of La Via Campesina, an international peasants’ movement with a membership over 200 million farmers, is one of six special Ambassadors for the Africa region nominated by the FAO raise public awareness about the contribution of pulses to food security, and the positive impacts they can have on climate change, human health and soil biology.

“Without these pulses a woman cannot call herself a mother of a family because you do not have a complete dish to feed your family,” said Mpofu, a mother of three. “There is need to create awareness of the importance of pulses to build a strong united voice which will enable women to lobby for policies that promote peasant agroecology and food sovereignty.”

Noting that farmers are challenged by lack of information, Mpofu says most have to make do with poor inputs, for example, growing commercial hybrid seeds rather than native varieties that have proven to be resilient for generations.

“The principles of keeping and producing native seeds is our way of advocating for food sovereignty through the promotion of our indigenous seeds and agroecology farming methods, and these principles can work in promoting the growing and consumption of pulses especially in Africa where we face challenges of food insecurity,” said Mpofu.

Recognising the importance of pulses to global food and nutritional security and environmental sustainability, the 68th United Nations General Assembly voted in 2013 to declare 2016 as the International Year of Pulses (IYOP).

FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said at the 2015 launch of IYOP that pulses are important for the food security of millions, particularly in Latin America, Africa and Asia, where they are part of traditional diets and often grown by small farmers.

The IYOP is positioning pulses as a key contributor to meeting Sustainable Development Goal #2 of ending hunger, achieving food security and improved nutrition while promoting sustainable agriculture.

In Malawi, farmers like Janet Mingo do not go hungry even when her maize crop fails — which it has done often owing to drought. The reason: protein rich pigeon peas (Cajanus Cajan) Mingo intercrops with maize on her quarter of a hectare plot in Chikalogwe village in the southern Balaka District, one of the driest regions of the country.

Pigeon peas are a nutritious legume which also improve crop yields by fixing nitrogen into the soil. More strategically for Mingo, pigeon peas are a key cash crop. Each season, Mingo harvests up to 1500 kg of pigeon pea from her plot, earning enough money to buy maize and cover other household needs.

“I now sell my maize crop and pigeon peas through the Agriculture Commodity Exchange,” said Mingo, who was introduced to pigeon pea by her local extension officer. “Life is hard but I do not feel the pinch.”

Mphatso Gama, the principal agricultural officer for Machinga Agriculture Development Division in Southern Malawi and a member of the National CA Taskforce, told IPS that farmers who used to rely entirely on maize have diversified into pigeon pea as a second crop. As a result, both their food security and income has improved.

“The drought-resilient pigeon has been a lifesaver,” Mphatso said. “While intercropping the nitrogen-fixing legume with maize has boosted yields, importantly pigeon peas have become a viable cash crop for farmers in Malawi, where it has a ready market and is a good source of protein for families.”

Tapping the trade power of pulses

Gavin Gibson, former executive director of the Global Pulse Confederation, told IPS that pulses are part of the traditional diets of the greater part of the world’s poorest population.

Gibson said of the 60 to 65 million tonnes of pulses produced annually, until very recently only around 7 to 10 million tonnes were traded between countries.  The rest were consumed domestically in countries where pulses are traditionally grown.

India, where pulses have been consumed for thousands of years as a staple food, is the biggest producer and consumer of pulses.  Africa is still finding its feet in ramping up its production of pulses, but is making progress.

“We think that this is likely to change quite quickly for a number of reasons, not least of which is the rapid emergence of new origins in Northern Europe and Africa,” Gibson said.

“We strongly believe — and will be forcefully promoting and driving — the view that increased demand from new market sectors that will rapidly emerge from the work of this group will of necessity force measures to be taken by governments and local communities alike to overcome present logistical and educational barriers in developing countries.”

Pulses, a climate-smart food

The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), which has developed more than 80 percent of cowpea varieties released to farmers in Nigeria through its breeding programmes, says pulses such as cowpea are an alternative source of protein from the expensive animal sources.

Cowpea – a widely grown food and animal feed legume in the semi arid tropics in Africa and Asia – is one of the most drought-tolerant crops adapted to the dry areas of poor soils. But there is more. Pulses helping fix nitrogen in the soil thrive under uncertain growing conditions, making them climate smart.

“There is no doubt that pulses are very important in food and nutrition security in Africa,” says Christian Fatokun, a cowpea breeder with IITA. “However, they are a part of the solution to food and nutritional security in Africa. Apart from being good sources of plant based protein they also help in providing nitrogen in the soil for companion or following crops because they are capable of fixing atmospheric nitrogen.”

Radical policies for pulse production

While strategic to ensuring food security in Africa, pulses are not being prioritised as an important crop, argues Charles Govati, a development specialist and chair of the Agriculture Supply Services Consortium (ASSC) in Malawi.

“Pulses are the perfect food for Africa but their production is challenged by imperfect policies,” Govati told IPS. “There too much lip service paid to pulses yet there are challenges of low production, poor soils, pests and diseases which affect their production. Farmers focus on growing more for income and less for food and nutrition, besides we need structured markets in Africa to boost production if we are serious about pulses in ensuring food security.”

Excerpt:

Nagomba E., 75, standing where her house used to be in Mwabulambo, Karonga district. She and her family were told to relocate in 2008 because the land was needed for coal mining. Credit: Lauren Clifford-Holmes for Human Rights Watch

By Birgit Schwarz
LILONGWE, Sep 27 2016 (IPS)

Nagomba E. is no longer young; her hip is giving her trouble and her back is stooped from years of bending over her corn and rice fields. Yet every morning, at the crack of dawn, the wiry 74-year-old sets out on a strenuous half-hour walk to fetch water from a nearby river so that her ailing husband can take a bath. Despite her limp, Nagomba moves fast and with the sure-footedness of a mountain goat.

It would be easier for her to fetch her water from a borehole that is closer to her house. But the water is often “bad” she says, “you cannot even use it for bathing.” Besides, she adds, “if you oversleep, you are there till noon,” waiting for a turn at the pump.

Before coal was discovered in Mwabulambo, a remote rural community of Karonga District in northern Malawi, water was never something Nagomba and her neighbours would have to worry about or even line up for.

“I used to have two taps right at my house,” Nagomba says, “with running water in the kitchen and bathroom.” But then heavy trucks moved in — which turned out to belong to a mining company. The company, with government’s approval, claimed her land, forced her to relocate to the edge of the coal field further south, and tore down her house. With it went the taps and water pipes.

That was almost nine years ago. Since then, the coal mine, which Nagomba and her neighbours hoped would bring progress and development, has mainly caused regression, hazards, and hardship.

Over the past decade, Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries, has promoted private investment in mining and resource extraction as a way to grow and diversify its largely agriculture-based economy. Karonga, where Nagomba lives, is the country’s test case for industrial mining.

Malawi’s first uranium mine and two of the country’s biggest coal mines are located here, on the western shores of Lake Malawi. The government said the mines would provide jobs and improve people’s livelihoods. Schools were promised, and clinics as well as boreholes to restore access to drinking water. Hardly any of these promises ever materialized.

Weak enforcement of existing laws and policies combined with lack of transparency and community involvement in decision making have left local communities unprotected and in the dark about their rights and about the risks mining activities might pose to their daily lives, Human Rights Watch says in a new report, “They Destroyed Everything.” Mining companies meanwhile are allowed to monitor themselves and are almost never held to account if they cause devastation.

When strangers knocked on her door during the 2008 rainy season and told her that she would have to move to make room for a coal mine, Nagomba was taken by surprise.

Nagomba, who supported three grandchildren and her sick husband with the income from farming a small but fertile plot of land, eventually accepted the inevitable, thinking that she would get “a lot of money.” She never asked how much, however. As it turned out, the compensation was not even enough to rebuild her house. The family had to sell two cows to put a roof over their heads again. She received no money for the land itself. It was “customary land” that her family had farmed for generations, but for which they held no individual title.

Mining machinery left behind at Eland coal mine at Mwabulambo after closure in 2015. Locals said that before the mine was closed, they were not informed about the closure or how the company intended to mitigate risks stemming from the abandoned mining site. Credit: Lauren Clifford-Holmes for Human Rights Watch

Over the years, Nagomba’s story repeated itself again and again in the mining areas of Karonga. In Mwabulambo alone, more than 30 households were relocated from their customary land between 2008 and 2015, when the mining company suspended operations. At times, the bulldozers moved in so fast that people had neither time to rebury their loved ones interred on the community’s land, nor to finish reconstructing their homes. One family spent weeks sleeping under a tree before they could move into their rebuilt house.

The mine is owned and operated by Eland Coal Mining Company, a subsidiary of the Isle of Man-based Heavy Mineral Limited, which in turn is owned by Independent Oil & Resources PLC – a company based in Cyprus. Although it has not been operational for more than a year, it continues to affect the area, its water resources, and Nagomba’s source of income, her crops.

“We used to grow corn, cassava and rice,” she recalls. “Now we are complaining of hunger.” The fields she was given lie on the edge of the mine. Every time it rains, blackish, potentially acidic, mine water runs into her fields, withering her crop and diminishing her yield. “We cannot afford to buy food. We need to farm,” she says. “But they have destroyed the land where we were producing fruit, and left us behind with nothing.”

Since the mine’s closure, the community has tried to get the company to clean up, restore their broken pipes, ensure that mine water no longer seeps into their borehole and onto their fields, and close the deep pits that were left behind. In 2015, the villagers went to the District Commissioner’s Office to air their grievances. Getting no help there, they marched to the gates of the company. “We told them ‘you are really wronging us,’” Nagomba recalls. “We don’t have water. We don’t have food. But we are still waiting for an answer.”

To this day, residents fear that the borehole and river water is putting their health at risk. Cows and even children have fallen into ill-secured, water-filled pits the company left behind. And villagers say the pits themselves have become breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitos.

“If they had built a health center, they could at least have saved some lives from malaria,” says Rojaina, another community member who was forced to relocate. As the promised clinic was never built and the nearest hospital is miles away in town, “people die on the way,” she says.

Few are aware of the dangers the water in the pits itself poses. The government had the water tested last year. These tests confirmed that the water is acidic, the deputy director for water quality at the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water told Human Rights Watch, which means that it is neither safe for consumption nor bathing. But the results have never been made public. Children regularly swim in the pits behind Nagomba’s house. And no signs warn of the dangers these pools pose to human health.

Now that Nagomba no longer has piped water, she depends on the river a lot, particularly during dry season, when borehole and well run dry, walking there up to four times a day to fetch water for bathing, drinking and cooking. She worries about the safety of the river water, too, but at least she can treat it with chemicals the government provided after a cholera outbreak at the beginning of the year.

The river Nagomba depends on flows into Lake Malawi, a fragile ecosystem and a key source of livelihood for over 1.5 million people. More than 10 extraction projects are located on the lake’s shores and tributaries, which are protected UNESCO World Heritage sites. Not all are active yet. But the risks these mining activities pose to the lake’s ecosystem and to the bordering communities’ health and livelihoods are enormous without proper government oversight.

So far, Malawi’s law has failed to protect the needs and rights of mining communities like Nagomba’s and her neighbours’ from the adverse effect mining has had on their lives. It has also failed to protect their environment and water resources. A new mining bill being drafted could help change this, strengthening governmental control over mining projects and the communities’ right to know.

Malawi’s government has taken some steps in the right direction, and acknowledged the need to enforce a rehabilitation plan the owners of the defunct Mwabulambo mine had promised to carry out. So far the company has done nothing.

“I never had problems,” says Nagomba, recalling a time where there was enough to eat and safe water to drink. “The mining company brought me problems.” After nine years of suffering and hunger without protection from the government or the mining company, she has little hope that things will change for the better in her lifetime. “Time is already up,” she says in a voice that sounds as if she is reciting poetry. “We are just waiting to go to our graves now.”

Excerpt:

Elephants in a solar-powered holding pen in Malawi, which is carrying out a major translocation between conservation parks. Credit: Charles Mkoka/IPS

By Charles Mkoka
LILONGWE, Jul 20 2016 (IPS)

One of the world’s largest and most significant elephant translocations kicked off earlier this month within Liwonde National Park in southern Malawi.

Patricio Ndadzela, Malawi country director of African Parks, a non-profit conservation group based in South Africa that is leading the relocation, told IPS that so far, 10 bulls and 144 family groups of elephants have been successfully captured from the park and transported 300 kilometers by truck to their new home in the Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve in central Malawi.

A few decades ago, around 1,500 elephants roamed Malawi’s biggest wildlife reserve, but now only a few herds totaling about 100 remain. The park is poised to be revitalised and serve as a critical elephant sanctuary for populations nationwide.

Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve covers 1,800 square kms of Miombo woodlands and afro-montane forest along Chipata Mountain on the border with Ntchisi district. The relocation, which began on July 3, involves tranquilising the elephants by dart from a helicopter and loading them by crane onto trucks for the journey to Nkhotakota."It's a story of hope and survival. It is a story of possibility." -- Peter Fearnhead, CEO of African Parks

The World Wildlife Federation notes that elephants remain under severe threat from ivory poaching, habitat loss, and human-wildlife conflict. Since 1979, African elephants have lost over half of their natural range. Less than 20 percent of African elephant habitat is currently under formal protection.

Local engagement for a balanced ecosystem

But Malawi is setting an example for the rest of the continent in how to protect elephants with the full consent and assistance of local communities. Before embarking on this major translocation exercise, African Parks engaged peripheral communities after taking over the reserve in July last year from government. Zonal area committees were established at the traditional authority level. These are chiefs of jurisdiction in the four districts that border the reserve. The districts are Nkhota Kota, Mzimba, Ntchisi and Kasungu.

“We have had a good working partnership with African Parks, together with the local people. They are managing the reserve for 25 years.  So far a number of activities have been done in consultations with the local people,” says Malijani Kachombo, the Traditional Authority Mphonde in Nkhota Kota district.

“They then brought the issue of restocking endangered species so that we have a more balanced ecosystem. This promise that they made has now been fulfilled today. The translocation of 500 elephants is no more a promise but reality.”

The animals will be well secured now as a new fence is already under construction and communities have been given ownership of the reserve, said the chief.

Other animals were also relocated, including 23 zebras, 25 elands, 220 waterbuck, 284 impalas, 32 warthogs, 99 kudu, 200 sables and two collared black rhinos.

A special landing site

As part of their integration into the reserve, a special landing site for the animals was chosen that provided for basic needs. According to Samuel Kamoto, African Parks Manager for Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve, the site was identified after confirming that it had adequate water, shelter and food for the animals.

More importantly, they considered the proximity of the landing site’s accessibility to the road, since the heavy trucks carrying the animals need to align the doors with the entrance of the holding pen.

“Elephants started arriving last night and we let them inside the holding pen so that they can rest and regroup as social beings and families. This enables the animals to settle down first other than just letting them out, which confuses them,” Kamoto told IPS.

Senior Lecturer in Ecology and Wildlife at Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources, John Kazembe, said that the move was a good option considering the fact that Liwonde National Park was relatively small. Overcrowding of elephant populations in Liwonde had led to the animals devouring large areas of vegetation and coming into conflict with local people.

“Elephant herds should be moved into the reserve at intervals so that the ecosystem is not overwhelmed by a one-off relocation,” Kazembe said.

Peter Fearnhead, Chief Executive Officer of African Parks, said “Most stories we hear about elephants in Africa are doom and gloom. This translocation of 500 elephants, which is a pivotal moment for Malawi who is emerging as a leader in African elephant conservation, is a story of hope and survival. It is a story of possibility.”

It’s hoped that this rich reserve, coupled with a good working partnership with the local populace, will enable the animals to resettle quickly.

The giant seven-week translocation is costing 1.6 million dollars, and has been made possible with support from the Dutch Postcode Lottery, the Wyss Foundation, the Wildcat Foundation, Donna and Marvin Schwartz, Dioraphte and the People’s Post Code Lottery.

Felistas Ngoma, 72, from Nkhamenya in the Kasungu District of Malawi, prepares nsima in her kitchen. Credit: Charity Chimungu Phiri/IPS

By Charity Chimungu Phiri
BLANTYRE, May 27 2016 (IPS)

It’s Saturday, market day at the popular Bvumbwe market in Thyolo district. About 40 kilometers away in Chiradzulu district, a vegetable vendor and mother of five, Esnart Nthawa, 35, has woken up at three a.m. to prepare for the journey to the market.

The day before, she went about her village buying tomatoes and okra from farmers, which she has safely packed in her dengu (woven basket).

Now she’s just waiting for a hired bicycle to take her and her merchandise to the bus station, where she will catch a minibus to Bvumbwe market. This way, her goods reach the market quicker and safer. Afterwards, she and her colleagues will pack their baskets and walk back home.

“We walk for at least three hours…our bodies have just gotten used to it because we have no choice. If I don’t do this, then my children will suffer. As I am talking to you now, they are waiting for me to bring them food,” Nthawa told IPS.

“I will buy a basin of maize there at the maize mill and have it processed into flour for nsima [a thick porridge that is Malawi’s staple food]. That’s the only meal they will eat today,” she said.

Nthawa added: “Last harvest we only realised two bags of maize as you know the weather was bad. That maize has now run out, we are living day by day…eating what we can manage to source for that day.”

Nthawa’s story resonates with many Malawians today. Almost half of the country’s population is facing hunger this year due to no or low harvests, resulting from the effects of El Nino which hit most parts of the southern and northern regions late last year.

Minister of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development George Chaponda said in Parliament on May 25 that 8.4 million Malawians will be food insecure during the 2016/2017 season.

His statement clearly contradicts President Peter Mutharika, who on Friday said in his State of the Nation Address that 2.8 million people faced hunger.

The new high figure follows a World Food Programme Rapid assessment which said over eight million Malawians will be food insecure this year due to the effects of El Nino. Destructive floods in the north have compounded the country’s woes, causing the president to declare a state of emergency in April.

With the drought also affecting Zimbabwe and other countries in southern Africa, an estimated 28 million people are now going hungry.

In order to deal with the crisis, Agriculture Minister Chaponda says the government has “laid out a plan to import about one million metric tons of white maize to fill the food gap”. The authorities project that at least 1,290,000 metric tons of maize are needed to deal with the food crisis, out of which 790,000 metric tons will be distributed to those heavily affected by the drought starting from April 2016 to March 2017.

The government also plans to intensify irrigation on commercial and smallholder farms, with an aim of increasing maize production at the national level. Officials say 18 million dollars is needed to carry out these measures.“There’s too much politicisation and overreliance on maize as a crop for consumption." -- Chairperson of the Right to Food Network Billy Mayaya

In the meantime, food prices continue to rise daily as the national currency, the Kwacha, continues to depreciate, forcing poor farming families to reduce their number of meals per day or sell their property in order to cope with the situation. A bag of maize which normally sells for seven dollars now costs 15 dollars.

As usual, children have been hardest hit by the situation. The latest statistics on Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) show a 100 percent increase from December 2015 to January 2016, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

UNICEF says it recorded more than 4,300 cases of severe malnutrition in the month of January alone this year, double the number recorded in December 2015.

Dr. Queen Dube, a pediatrician at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre – the main government referral hospital in southern Malawi – affirmed to IPS that there has been an increase in the number of malnutrition cases at the hospital.

“At the moment, we have about 15 children admitted at our Nutrition Rehabilitation Unit…they have Marasmus, where they’re very thin or wasted, while others have Kwashiorkor, where the body is swollen. In other cases, the children have a combination of the two. These children suffer greatly from diarrheal diseases,” said Dube.

She added that the hospital offers these children therapeutic feeding of special types of milk and chiponde (fortified peanut butter) for a determined period of time, until they pick up in weight and improve in general body appearance.

“They are also given treatment for any underlying illness which they might have. Additionally, we also provide counseling to the mothers and guardians on proper nutrition so that when they get back home they can utilize the very little foods they have to prepare nutritious meals for their children,” she explained.

Rights activists say it is high time the authorities started taking on board recommendations on how to make Malawi food secure made by independent groups such as the Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee-MVAC, which said 2.8 million people faced hunger in 2015.

Chairperson of the Right to Food Network Billy Mayaya told IPS: “There’s too much politicisation and overreliance on maize as a crop for consumption. The government needs to use the data from MVAC as well as consider the Green Belt Initiative (GBI) and modalities to bring it to fruition.

Calling for greater diversity in the traditional diet, he said, “These plans can be effected as long as there‘s a sustained political will.”

In his state of the nation address on May 20, President Mutharika said the Green Belt Initiative was still his government’s priority “in order to increase productivity of selected high value crops.

“I am therefore pleased to report that construction of the irrigation infrastructure and the sugarcane factory in Salima district has been completed…the government has an ongoing Land Management Contract with Malawi Mangoes Limited where land has been provided for the production of bananas and mangoes,” he said.

In addition, the president said the government plans to increase rice production for both consumption and export, as well as make the tobacco industry vibrant again. Malawi mainly relies on tobacco for its foreign exchange earnings.

In February, President Mutharika made an international appeal for assistance, following which development partners including Britain and Japan provided over 35 million dollars. The government also obtained 80 million dollars from the World Bank for the Emergency Floods Recovery Project.

The U.S. government has been the first to respond to the latest crisis, providing the Malawian government with 55 million dollars.

Meanwhile, the struggle for survival continues for poor Malawian families such as Esnart Nthawa’s. Her children are still eating one meal a day, as those in power continue to meet to strategize on the crisis over fancy dinners in expensive hotels.

By Frederic Mousseau
OAKLAND, California, Jan 11 2016 (IPS)

Millions of African farmers don’t need to adapt to climate change. They have done that already.

Frederic Mousseau

Like many others across the continent, indigenous communities in Ethiopia’s Gamo Highlands are well prepared against climate variations. The high biodiversity, which forms the basis of their traditional enset-based agricultural systems, allows them to easily adjust their farming practices, including the crops they grow, to climate variations.

People in Gamo are also used to managing their environment and natural resources in sound and sustainable ways, rooted in ancestral knowledge and customs, which makes them resilient to floods or droughts. Although African indigenous systems are often perceived as backward by central governments, they have a lot of learning to offer to the rest of the world when contemplating the challenges of climate change and food insecurity.

Often building on such indigenous knowledge, farmers all over the African continent have assembled a tremendous mass of successful experiences and innovations in agriculture. These efforts have steadily been developed over the past few decades following the droughts that impacted many countries in the 1970s and 1980s.

In Kenya, the system of biointensive agriculture has been designed over the past thirty years to help smallholders grow the most food on the least land and with the least water. 200,000 Kenyan farmers, feeding over one million people, have now switched to biointensive agriculture, which allows them to use up to 90 per cent less water than in conventional agriculture and 50 to 100 per cent fewer purchased fertilizers, thanks to a set of agroecological practices that provide higher soil organic matter levels, near continuous crop soil coverage, and adequate fertility for root and plant health.

The Sahel region, bordering the Sahara Desert, is renowned for its harsh environment and the threat of desertification. What is less known is the tremendous success of the actions undertaken to curb desert encroachment, restore lands, and farmers’ livelihoods.

Started in the 1980s, the Keita Rural Development Project in Niger took some twenty years to restore ecological balance and drastically improve the agrarian economy of the area. During the period, 18 million trees were planted, the surface under woodlands increased by 300 per cent, whereas shrubby steppes and sand dunes decreased by 30 per cent. In the meantime, agricultural land was expanded by about 80 per cent.

All over the region, a multitude of projects have used agroecological solutions to restore degraded land and spare scarce water resources while at the same time increasing food production, and improving farmers’ livelihoods and resilience. In Timbuktu, Mali, the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) has reached impressive results, with yields of 9 tons of rice per hectare, more than double of conventional methods, while saving water and other inputs. In Burkina Faso, soil and water conservation techniques, including a modernized version of traditional planting pits­zai­ have been highly successful to rehabilitate degraded soils and boost food production and incomes.

Southern African countries have been struggling with recurrent droughts resulting in major failures in corn crops, the main staple cereal in the region. Over the years, farmers and governments have developed a wide variety of agroecological solutions to prevent food crises and foster their resilience to climatic shocks. The common approach in all these responses has been to depart from the conventional monocropping of corn, which is highly vulnerable to climate shocks while it is also very costly and demanding in purchased inputs such as hybrid seeds and fertilizers. Successful sustainable and affordable solutions include managing and harvesting rain water, expanding conservation and regenerative farming, promoting the production and consumption of cassava and other tuber crops, diversifying production, and integrating crops with fertilizer trees and nitrogen fixating leguminous plants.

The enumeration could go on. The few examples cited above all come from a series of 33 case studies released recently by the Oakland Institute. The series sheds light on the tremendous success of agroecological agriculture across the African continent in the face of climate change, hunger, and poverty.

These success stories are just a sample of what Africans are already doing to adapt to climate variations while preserving their natural resources, improving their livelihoods and their food supply. One thing they have in common is that they have farmers, including many women farmers, in the driver’s seat of their own development. Millions of farmers who practice agroecology across the continent are local innovators who experiment to find the best solutions in relation to water availability, soil characteristics, landscapes, cultures, food habits, and biodiversity.

Another common feature is that they depart from the reliance on external agricultural inputs such as commercial seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and chemical pesticides, on which is based the so-called conventional agriculture. The main inputs required for agroecology are people’s own energy and common sense, shared knowledge, and of course respect for and a sound use of natural resources.

Why are these success stories mostly untold, is a fair question to ask. They are largely buried under the rhetoric of a development discourse based on a destructive cocktail of ignorance, greed, and neocolonialism. Since the 2008 food price crisis, we have been told over and over that Africa needs foreign investors in agriculture to ‘develop’ the continent; that Africa needs a Green Revolution, more synthetic fertilizers, and genetically modified crops in order to meet the challenges of hunger and poverty. The agroecology case studies debunk these myths.

Evidence is there, with irrefutable facts and figures, that millions of Africans have already designed their own solutions, for their own benefits. They have successfully adapted to both the unsustainable agricultural systems inherited from the colonial times, and to the present challenges of climate change and environmental degradation. Unfortunately, a majority of African governments, with encouragement from donor countries, focus most of their efforts and resources to subsidize and encourage a model of agriculture, largely reliant on the expensive commercial agricultural inputs, in particular synthetic fertilizers mainly sold by a handful of Western corporations.

The good news is that an agroecological transition is affordable for African governments. They spend billions of dollars every year to subsidize fertilizers and pesticides for their farmers. In Malawi, the government’s subsidies to agricultural inputs, mostly fertilizers, amount to close to 10 percent of the national budget every year. The evidence that exists, based on the experience of millions of farmers, should prompt African governments to make the only reasonable choice: to give the continent a leading role in the way out of world hunger and corporate exploitation and move to a sustainable and climate-friendly way to produce food or all.

(End)

Excerpt:

Fish farming has fast turned into a way for many Africans to beat poverty and hunger. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Aug 5 2015 (IPS)

Hillary Thompson, aged 62, throws some grains of left-over rice from his last meal, mixed with some beer dregs from his sorghum brew, into a swimming pool that he has converted into a fish pond.

“For over a decade, fish farming has become a hobby that has earned me a fortune,” Thompson, who lives in Milton Park, a low density area in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, told IPS. In fact, he has been able to acquire a number of properties which he now rents out.

Thompson is just one of many here who have struck gold through fish farming.

African strides in fish farming are gaining momentum at a time the United Nations is urging nations the world over to ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns as part of its proposed new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) when they expire this year.In many African towns and cities, thriving fish farmers have converted their swimming pools and backyards into small-scale fish farming ponds, triggering their proverbial rise from rags to riches

The SDGs are a universal set of 17 goals, targets and indicators that U.N. member states are expected to use as development benchmarks in framing their agendas and political policies over the next 15 years.

Faced with nutritional deficits, a number of Africans have turned to fish farming even in towns and cities to complement their diets.

In Zimbabwe, an estimated 22,000 people are involved in fish farming, according to statistics from the country’s Ministry of Agriculture.

Behind the success of many of these fish farmers stands the Aquaculture Zimbabwe Trust, which was established in 2008 to mobilise resources for the sustainable development of environmentally-friendly fisheries in Zimbabwe as a strategy to counter chronic poverty and improve people’s livelihoods.

Over the years, it has been on the ground offering training aimed at building capacity to support the development of fish farming.

The figure for fish farmers is even higher in Malawi, where some 30,000 people are active in fish farming-related activities, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Fisheries are reported to contribute about 70 percent to the protein intake of the developing country’s estimated 14 million people, most of whom are too poor to afford meat.

For many Malawians like Lewis Banda from Blantyre, the country’s second largest city, fish farming has become the way to go. “Fish breeding is a less demanding economic venture, which anyone willing can undertake to do, and fish sell faster because they are cheaper,” he told IPS.

In many African towns and cities, thriving fish farmers have converted their swimming pools and backyards into small-scale fish farming ponds, and many like Banda have seen fish farming trigger their proverbial rise from rags to riches.

“I was destitute when I came to Blantyre eight years ago, but now thanks to fish farming, I have become a proud owner of home rights in the city,” Banda said.

Globally, FAO estimates the value of fish trade to be 51 billion dollars per annum, with over 36 million people employed directly through fishing and aquaculture, while as many as 200 million people derive direct and indirect income from fish.

FAO also reports that, across Africa, fishing provides direct incomes for about 10 million people – half of whom are women – and contributes to the food supply of 200 million more people.

In Uganda, for example, lake fishing yield catches are worth more than 200 million dollars a year, contributing 2.2 percent to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), while fish farming employs approximately 135,000 fishers and 700,000 more in fish processing and trading.

The rising fish farming trend comes at a time when the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) has been on record as calling for initiatives such as fish farming to be replicated in order for Africa to harness the full potential of its fisheries in order to strengthen national economies, combat poverty and improve people’s food security and nutrition.

Last year in South Africa, Alan Fleming, the director of The Business Place, an entrepreneur development and assistance organisation based in Cape Town, came up with the idea of using shipping containers as fish ponds, an idea that was well received by the country’s poor communities.

“My children are now all in school thanks to the noble idea hatched by Fleming of having a fish farm designed within the confines of a shipping container, which is indeed an affordable idea for many low-income earners like me,” Mpho Ntabiseni from Philippi, a low-income township in Cape Town, told IPS.

Citing a growing shortage of traditionally harvested fish, the South African government invested 100 million rands (7.8 million dollars) last year in aquaculture projects in all four of the country’s coastal provinces.

In 2014, some 71,000 South Africans were involved in fish farming, according to figures from South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affairs.

Nutrition experts say that fish farming has added nutritional value to many poor people’s diets. “Fish farming helps poor African communities to add high-value protein to their diet since Africa often suffer challenges of malnutrition,” Agness Mwansa, an independent nutritionist based in Lusaka, the Zambian capital, told IPS.

Adding an environmental concern to the benefits of fish farming, Julius Sadi of the Aquaculture Zimbabwe Trust, told IPS that “fish from aquaculture ponds are preferred by consumers because they are bred in water that is exposed to very little or no pollution, which means that there is high demand and therefore high income for fish farmers.”

As a result, donor agencies such as the U.K. Department for International Development (DfID) have helped to give Africa’s aquaculture industry a kick-start over the last decade.

According to FAO studies, about 9.2 million square kilometres (31 percent of the land area) of sub-Saharan Africa is suitable for smallholder fish farming, while 24 countries in the region are battling with food crises, twice as many as in 1990.

The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015 report released jointly by FAO and the World Food Programme (WFP) says that the East and Central Africa regions are most affected, with more than 30 percent of the people in the two regions classified as undernourished.

With fish farming gaining popularity, it could be the only means for many African to beat poverty and hunger. “Fish breeding has emancipated many of us from poverty,” said Banda.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Zambian cotton grower sitting on his bales. Some African governments and local cotton producers have high hopes that GM technology will boost African competitiveness in the dog-eat-dog world that characterises the global cotton market. Credit: Nebert Mulenga/IPS

By Haidee Swanby
MELVILLE, South Africa, Jun 15 2015 (IPS)

Genetically modified (GM) cotton has been produced globally for almost two decades, yet to date only three African countries have grown GM cotton on a commercial basis – South Africa, Burkina Faso and Sudan.

African governments have been sceptical of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for decades and have played a key role historically in ensuring that international law – the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety – takes a precautionary stance towards genetic engineering in food and agriculture.

They have also imposed various restrictions and bans on the cultivation and importation of GMOs, including on genetically modified (GM) food aid.

But now resistance to GM cultivation is crumbling as a number of other African countries such as Malawi, Ghana, Swaziland and Cameroon appear to be on the verge of allowing their first cultivation of GM cotton, with Nigeria and Ethiopia planning to follow suit in the next two to three years.“Scrutiny of actual experiences [with GM cotton] reveals a tragic tale of crippling debt, appalling market prices and a technology prone to failure in the absence of very specific and onerous management techniques, which are not suited to smallholder production”

Some African governments and local cotton producers have high hopes that GM technology will boost African competitiveness in the dog-eat-dog world that characterises the global cotton market.

At the moment African cotton productivity is declining – it now stands at only half the world average – while global productivity is increasing. The promise of improving productivity and reducing pesticide use through the adoption of GM cotton is thus compelling.

However, African leaders and cotton producers need to take a close look at how GM cotton has fared in South Africa and Burkina Faso to date, particularly its socioeconomic impact on smallholder farmers.

Scrutiny of actual experiences reveals a tragic tale of crippling debt, appalling market prices and a technology prone to failure in the absence of very specific and onerous management techniques, which are not suited to smallholder production.

As stated by a farmer during a Malian public consultation on GMOs, “What’s the point of encouraging us to increase yields with GMOs when we can’t get a decent price for what we already produce?”

In Burkina Faso, the tide turned against GM cotton after just five seasons as low yields and low quality fibres persisted. In South Africa, GM cotton brought devastating debts to smallholders and the local credit institution went bust. Last season, smallholders contributed to less than three percent of South Africa’s total production.

In Malawi, Monsanto has already applied to the government for a permit to commercialise Bollgard II, its GM pest resistant cotton, to which there has been a strong reaction from civil society and an alliance of organisations has submitted substantive objections.

Even Malawi’s cotton industry, the Cotton Development Trust (CDT), has publically voiced its concerns over a number of issues, including inadequate field trials, the high cost of GM seed and related inputs, and blurred intellectual property arrangements.

In addition, CDT has expressed unease over the potential development of pest resistance and the inevitable applications of herbicide chemicals.

Regional economic communities (RECs), such as the Common Market for East and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the Economic Community for West African States (ECOWAS), are also key players in readying their member states for the commercialisation of and trade in GM cotton, through harmonised biosafety policies. Together COMESA and ECOWAS incorporate 34 countries in Africa.

The COMESA Policy on Biotechnology and Biosafety was adopted in February 2014 and member states validated the implementation plan in March 2015.

The ECOWAS Biosafety Policy has been through an arduous process for more than a decade now and pronounced conflicts between trade imperatives and safety checks have stalled agreement between stakeholders. However, recent reports indicate that agreement between member states and donor parties has been reached and a final draft of the Biosafety Policy will soon be published.

Experiments and open field trials with GM cotton have been running for many years in a number of African countries and are increasingly at a stage where applications for commercial release are imminent.

However, there are many obstacles to the birth of a new GM era in Africa, chief among them the fact that this high-end technology is simply not appropriate to resource-poor farmers operating on tiny pieces of land, together with fierce opposition from civil society and sometimes also from governments.

Attempts by the biotech industry to impose policies that pander to investors’ desires at the expense of environmental and human safety may be easier to realise at the regional level, through the trade-friendly RECs. This is where many biotech industry resources and efforts are currently being channelled.

Despite whatever legal environments may be implemented to enable the introduction of GM cotton regionally or nationally, the fact remains that Africa’s cotton farmers are operating in a difficult global sector – prices are erratic and distorted by unfair subsidies in the North, institutional support for their activities is often lacking, and high input costs are already annihilating profit margins.

Fighting for the introduction of more expensive technologies that have already proven themselves technologically unsound in a smallholder environment is deeply irresponsible and short-sighted.

It is time that African governments turn their resources to improving the local environments in which cotton producers operate, including institutional and infrastructural support that can bring long-term sustainability to the sector, without placing further burdens and vulnerability on some of the most marginalised people in the world.

Civil society actions will continue to vehemently oppose and challenge the false solutions promised by GM cotton and will insist on just trading environments and true and sustainable upliftment for African cotton producers.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

* This opinion piece is based on the author’s more extensive paper titled Cottoning on to the Lie, published by the African Centre for Biodiversity, June 2015

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