Humanitarian

We have reached a stage where climate change can no longer be looked at as a fallacy – in Malawi it is evidently taking away people’s livelihoods. Today in Malawi, droughts and floods are more severe and frequent than they used to be.

A study by the Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee (MVAC) has shown that the climatic phenomenon, El Niño is responsible for putting up to 6.5 million people (39% of the country’s population) at risk of being food insecure during the 2016/17 consumption period. 

Oxfam, Concern Universal, Concern Worldwide, Save the Children and GOAL today welcomed the Government of Malawi’s decision to declare an emergency in response to a further looming hunger in the country. They called on the Government, Malawi’s donors and the international community to immediately respond to this declaration by providing the necessary support to meet the scale of the food crisis.

Eluby Chabwera and her family’s normal routine of subsistence farming was temporarily halted when flooding affected their crops in early January 2015. Due to the heavy rains, almost all their crops were washed away, giving them the lowest yield they have ever encountered as a household. Eluby has two sons, Rafiki and Talandira, but she also looks after her sister’s daughter, Emily.

The scale of the disaster in the Lower Shire has wreaked havoc on the densely populated country of Malawi, where most people survive from subsistence farming. Crops of maize have been destroyed, villages obliterated, homes swept away and livestock killed.

Despite the predicament, there are children who have survived to tell their tales. While they crowd in tents in the camps, where there are no comforts as they might have used to enjoy at home, they begin to feel safe in their new families.

Homes swept away like grass. Farms, huge farms, turned to mud, fields of precious crops drowned. Thousands of livestock gone unaccounted for. Human lives lost. Families separated leaving children unaccompanied.