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Malawi - A Portrait

se6394
4. Sept. 2014
3 Min. Lesezeit

Malawi is the country that I will spend my next 4 months in. I feel like sharing some of the information that I found about it, before actually experiencing for myself.

Malawi is also called "The Warm Heart of Africa". This is not only due to the climate, but primarily because of the people, who are warm hearted, friendly and like to laugh. Anything that I heard about the people of Malawi (be it from friends who have visited the country, or newspaper articles) sounds very promising - more on this once I have experienced it for myself.

Malawi is with 118,000 sq km2 about 3 times bigger than Switzerland (41,000 sq km2). Like Switzerland it is landlocked, but there is a huge lake: Lake Malawi (the 9th biggest lake on earth). David Livingstone - a Scottish missionary and among the first mzungus (white people) in Malawi - used surprisingly poetic language to discribe the nature before him. He wrote of „scenes so lovely they must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight“. He called Lake Malawi the “Lake of Stars”, presumably because of the reflections of the wavelets when gazing over the water from Mumbo Bay (Seery, 2014).

Surprisingly, Malawi is not one of the big tourist destinations yet, and you will probably find many of the things still the same way as they were to Livingstone’s time. However, it is one of the coming ones. For a good reason: Malawi is very diverse – you can go into the highlands, see lot’s of wildlife, and of course there is Lake Malawi, where you can go swimming, kayaking, snorkeling, or scuba diving. I for my part am very eager to experience Malawi and its people in all its diversities.

However, of course not everything is great in Malawi and there are still many problems that the country struggles with. Here are a couple:

Corruption: Malawi is on place 91 out of 166 (1 being the least corrupt) in the corruption perception index of 2013 (compare to Switzerland: 7, Russia: 127; see Transparency International). A friend of mine sent me an article about “Malawi’s missing factory”, where the government apparently paid out a 54 million dollar credit to build a timber factory, which has never been built (Mtika, 2014).
Poverty: Malawi is among the poorest countries in the world, ranking on place 174 out of 187 (1 being the most developed) in the human development index (see United Nations).
Aids: Malawi has the highest rate of HIV infections in the world, and aids is the number 1 cause of death for adults in Malawi. It is one of the main influences on the low life expectancy of 55, and the fact that 47 % of Malawi's population are 14 or younger. However, “[t]he government and international donors have both made commendable efforts to increase access to treatment and to improve prevention initiatives” (see avert.org). This has lowered the annual infection rate from 100,000 new infections in 2003 to 46,000 in 2011.