Beneath the shadow of the majestic Mulanje Mountain, the land whispers stories of both abundance and despair. Here, in Phalombe District, where the soil should nurture life, a relentless cycle of climate disasters has transformed fields into battlegrounds. For 85,000 children under five, this fight is not just for food, it is for survival itself.
At Mwanga Health Centre, 21-year-old mother Mary Sapeza held her frail baby close as a health worker carefully wrapped a Mid-Upper Arm Circumference (MUAC) tape around the infant’s thin arm. The reading, 11.3 centimetres, confirmed what Mary feared: severe malnutrition.
“I felt helpless. The rains fell; we thought we would have a bumper yield. Suddenly, we had prolonged dry spells, the crop dried up prematurely, and my child began to waste away,” Sapeza recalls.
Yet hope arrived in the form of Super Cereal Plus, a fortified corn and soy blend provided by the World Food Programme’s Supplementary Feeding Programme (SFP). After just one month, her child’s MUAC had improved to 12.5 centimetres, finally pulling her out of immediate danger.
For 29-year-old Beatrice Muchili, the struggle is painfully familiar. Her three-year-old daughter was also diagnosed with severe malnutrition.
“We depend on farming,” Muchili explains. “However, for three years in a row, floods, droughts and cyclones have left us with almost nothing,” she bemoans.
The three kilogrammes of Super Cereal Plus she collects every two weeks have been a lifeline. But when supplies run out, as they sometimes do, the fear of losing her child resurfaces.
Mwanga Health Centre serves over 26,000 people. Since February 2025, 1,491 children, pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers have enrolled in the SFP across Phalombe.
“We see new cases daily,” says medic Frank Kanjoma. “When Super Cereal Plus is out of stock, parents lose hope and stop coming. That delay can be fatal,” he adds.
In Phalombe, hunger and climate change are inseparable. Cyclone Freddy’s devastating floods reportedly wiped out entire villages, only for El Niño’s searing heat to parch the land months later.
“Environmental degradation is making things worse,” warns Charles Mkoka, Executive Director of the Coordination Union for the Rehabilitation of the Environment (CURE). “Without diverse crops, children in farming families are always the first to suffer,” adds Mkoka.
Officials in Phalombe say local nutrition teams are teaching families to grow drought-tolerant crops, rear chickens and goats, and cultivate backyard gardens to mitigate impact of climate change on nutrition status of children in the district.
Phalombe District’s Chief Nutrition Officer, Lucy Ndiwo, says these small changes can break the cycle.
“We can’t control the weather, but we can control how we prepare. So we teach them here at the health facility when the lactating mothers come for routine checkups and our health officers go into the remote areas of the district teaching the communities on how they can reduce maNdiwo says.
In nearby Salima District, Principal Nutrition Officer Yamikani Makondi encourages mothers to reserve part of their harvest for home meals rather than selling everything.
“Feed your children first,” he urges.
At national level, Malawi’s National Multi-Sector Nutrition Policy and Strategic Plan calls for coordinated action across health, agriculture and social protection sectors to reduce child stunting and wasting.
The government’s proposal to raise the health budget to 12.2% of total spending moves closer to the Abuja Declaration target of 15%. This increase could mean more trained nutrition officers, better-stocked clinics and faster disaster response.
What is happening in Phalombe resonates beyond Malawi. It highlights the urgency of Sustainable Development Goal 2: Zero Hunger, while intersecting with health, climate action and poverty reduction goals.
Mkoka stresses the importance of long-term investments in climate-resilient farming, nutrition-sensitive policies, early warning systems and robust social safety nets.
Mary keeps the MUAC tape at home as a quiet reminder of how close she came to losing her child. Beatrice still makes the long walk to Mwanga Health Centre every fortnight, rain or shine, to collect the Super Cereal Plus provided by the WFP — ensuring her child is no longer malnourished.
Their courage is unshakable proof that, even in the cruel grip of disasters, survival is possible when policy, financing and community resilience come together.
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