About Malawi and the village

About Malawi

Malawi is a country in East Africa bordering Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique. Around 60% of the people live below the poverty line of one and a half dollars a day, and of those, about 14% are ultra-poor and go hungry every day. There is hardly any work; the country has barely any natural resources, and many people are seriously ill with malaria or AIDS.

Malawi borders Lake Malawi, the 5th largest lake in the world and up to 700 metres deep!

To put this in perspective: if you poured all that water over the Netherlands, the country would be 250 metres under water!

Partly because of this, Malawi experiences big climate swings: heavy rainy seasons followed by extreme drought, which often causes the harvest to fail. Cyclones swept across the country in both 2023 and 2024, damaging agriculture two years in a row.

So it is not only extremely dry, but it can also be very wet during the rainy season.

And as recently as February 2026 there was a storm that, among other things, blew the roof off the home of one of our volunteers, and a flood that washed away the bridge on the main road and several houses, just above our village.

The village: Mbamba Village Kande

The village lies on the lake and is home to around 1,000 families, who live mainly on what they grow themselves on small plots of land, or who sell a little food or charcoal by the roadside. The poorest sleep on the sand under a jute sack or torn blankets. Hardly anyone has a bank account. And yet people share a great deal within their community. Almost everyone is a small farmer with a small plot of land. Maize is widely eaten, but the harvest often yields only a few bags a year. Cassava is the easiest crop to grow; some families eat it three times a day. We train farmers so that they no longer need to use artificial fertiliser and can use compost instead. Our foundation now produces food itself, on its own land.