Climatic shocks—including droughts, floods, and storms—continue to adversely affect agricultural livelihoods and reduce food availability in Malawi, creating widespread food insecurity and intensifying persistent humanitarian needs. Strong El Niño conditions, which result in severe droughts or above-average rainfall in Southern Africa, will likely contribute to additional shocks and exacerbate needs in the country during the October-to-April rainy season, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network.
In March 2023, Tropical Cyclone Freddy made landfall in southern Malawi, bringing heavy rainfall and subsequent floods that resulted in the deaths of approximately 1,000 people, displaced nearly 660,000 individuals, and negatively affected an estimated 506,000 acres of agricultural land, according to the UN. The cyclone also exacerabted conditions faced by communities recovering from two previous cyclones in 2022 and affected health and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure amid an ongoing countrywide cholera outbreak which began in March 2022 and resulted in 1,771 deaths and more than 59,100 recorded cases as of January 2024, according to the UN World Health Organization (WHO).
An estimated 4.4 million people across Malawi are expected to face Crisis—IPC 3—or worse levels of acute food insecurity during the November 2023-to-March 2024 lean season, largely due to the effects of multiple shocks, including disease, poor macroeonomic conditions, according to the IPC Technical Working Group. Relatedly, stocks of maize—a staple household food in Malawi—are dwindling, contributing to a nearly 90 percent increase in the price of maize between December 2022 and December 2023.
Nearly 53,000 refugees—primarily from Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Rwanda—were residing in Malawi, some for more than two decades, as of November 30, 2023, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports. The vast majority—approximately 50,000 people—reside in central Malawi’s Dzaleka refugee camp, which was originally designed to accommodate only 12,000 residents. The Government of Malawi enforces a policy introduced in 2021 of requiring refugees and asylum-seekers to reside in the camp, which lacks adequate resources to assist new arrivals. More than 2,000 refugees and asylum-seekers have returned to the camp since the introduction of the policy.
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