It was the middle of the night on 7 March when Annie decided to flee her home with her children, including baby Ndaziona, who had been born just two days before. It had been raining for four days, the nearby Shire river was rising, and the family’s mud brick and straw house was becoming precarious. Annie woke in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. “I looked outside and saw lots of water coming,” she recalls. “I took the children and ran. We got maybe 10 or 20 metres before the house collapsed behind us.” Continue reading “Water of life: helping two-week-old Ndaziona survive” →

Praisewell Ayishoshe, 9, sits outside the home he shares with his uncle, Chikumbutso Jamu, and his new wife in an urban township on the edge of Lilongwe. Chikumbutso is a DJ who makes music and video CDs for a living, which he sells at the local market. In the lounge is a sound system and laptop that he uses to make the discs. A compilation of Nigerian and South African hip-hop music is in progress. Praisewell, or Praise for short, has his own bedroom and goes to a local school. Continue reading “Superstar DJ: Praise finds a new home with his uncle” →

The sprawling campus of Chancellor College is on the edge of Malawi’s former capital city, Zomba, with the dramatic profile of Zomba Plateau behind it. It is only 120 kms from the dirt tracks, maize fields, and mud-brick villages of student Tiffany’s home in Mangochi, but it feels like a world away. Fashionably dressed students sit in groups chatting on manicured lawns in front of the modern library building and lecture halls. A young man in a Che Guevara t-shirt walks past two women in colourful Muslim head scarfs. Flyers on the noticeboard outside the library advertise everything from music concerts to a study tour of the Ministry of Finance. It could be a university campus anywhere in the world.

Continue reading “Donuts to dissertations: UNICEF scholars make it to university” →

Mary Lingisoni, 11, lives with her two older sisters, Agnes and Ellen, father and stepmother in a township on the edge of Lilongwe. It’s a very normal Malawian set up. The family rent a small brick two-bedroom house, with a sparsely furnished lounge and front porch. The girls sleep in one room and their parents in the other. Their father does odd jobs in construction. The township is like a dense village, with narrow dirt roads weaving between tightly packed houses. Chickens and goats roam freely and women walk to water kiosks with large plastic buckets on their heads.

Continue reading “Happy together: Mary returns to her family after seven years” →

It is a hot, dry and windy day at Nankhali school, on the edge of Lilongwe. Most of the school is outdoors, with classes held under trees. Wherever there is a tree, dozens of children in blue school uniforms sit on the bare earth ground around a teacher, with a blackboard leant against the tree trunk.

Continue reading “Building blocks: Aness looks forward to her new classroom” →

In the middle of a muddy field next to a reservoir in Kasungu District, a team of scientists are hard at work. Boxes of equipment lie scattered around a patch of dry ground, where Lancaster University’s Michelle Stanton programmes an automated drone flight into a laptop perched on a metal box. The craggy peak of Linga Mountain (‘watch from afar’ in the local language) looms over the lake, casting its reflection in the water. A local cattle farmer stops with his herd to watch the unusual activity.
Continue reading “Drones vs mosquitos: using high and low-tech to fight malaria” →