The Shrinking of Malawi’s Chilwa Lake and its Greater Implications

Lake Chilwa, Malawi – Credit: Kevin Souza (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Cross-linked on Bertelsmann Stiftung – Future Challenges’ Site

In 2004, Malawi’s population was estimated at 12.3 million with an annual growth rate of 2.1 percent. Malawi is the most densely populated country in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, with a population density of 104 inhabitants per square kilometer. About 83 percent of the total population was rural, and 81% of Malawi’s economically active population was employed in the agricultural sector.

Agriculture contributed 37.6 percent of Malawi’s GDP (1.7 billion USD) in 2003. Agriculture accounts for about 90 percent of the country’s export earnings, of which tobacco comprised for 60 percent.

Malawi’s second-largest lake, Lake Chilwa, located near the Malawi-Mozambique border is shrinking, and not just seasonally. The lake, located in the eastern Zomba District, is about 60 kilometers long and 40 kilometers wide, the lake is surrounded by extensive wetlands. There is a large island in the middle of the lake called Chisi Island.

Possible factors include the climate change and declining soil fertility, which induce farmers to become increasingly dependent upon the lake for irrigation and fluctuations in rainfall levels, which alter the lake’s ecosystem.

Lake Chilwa is a shallow lake which shrinks significantly in the dry season, increasing greatly in volume during the rainy season. The lake is a center of sustenance and commerce, supporting 335 villages with over 60,000 inhabitants who participate in a thriving fishing industry. Additionally, the waters of Lake Chilwa are essential to local agriculture, especially as local farmers adjust to climate change.

The lake has no outlet, and is at risk for drying up if its waters are diverted for human use. The International Association for Great Lakes Research (IAGLR) has found that Lake Chilwa faces overfishing and increased degradation as the number of fishermen increases and as the population practices agriculture around the basin and inside the lake during the dry season. The full report can be found here.

This is salient because Malawi’s farmers overwhelmingly grow mono-cultures, and until recently, corn occupied 90 percent of cultivated land and comprised 54 percent of Malawian caloric intake, as covered in a previous article. However, in response to the global commodities market (cash crops like corn and tobacco saw prices drop, while cotton prices rose), many Malawian farmers switched to

Addressing African Youths’ Periods of Inactivity Between Educational Attainment & Employment

Cross-linked with Bertelsmann Stiftung – Future Challenges

Sixty-five percent of Africa’s population is under the age of 24, with over 40 percent of the total population below the age of 16, and about 25 percent between the ages 15 and 24. The issue of education is a recurring theme in conversations about Africa’s youth. World Bank data shows that in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, and Mozambique more than 75 percent of out-of-school youth have no “education at all.”

In a study of 13 African countries, findings showed that rural youth are less likely to be in school, and urban youth (except in Kenya) tended to have greater educational opportunities. However, rural youth often joined the workforce earlier and were less likely to be unemployed, compared to their urban counterparts (except in Kenya and Ethiopia) who saw longer periods of inactivity as they transitioned from school to work. In a 2008 World Bank executive summary entitled “Youth in Africa’s Labor Market, it was noted that:

“In 8 of the 13 countries reviewed (Cameroon, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, São Tomé and Principe, and Zambia), young people face about five years of inactivity before finding work; youth in Uganda are inactive for more than three years on average.

Africa’s Corn Monocultures and the Global Commodities Market

[Crossposted at Future Challenges Organization]

How does the increased diversion of corn for biofuel production affect African farmers?

The history of corn in Africa can be traced back to the early 1500s, when Portuguese explorers recorded the cultivation of what they termed „zaburro“ or „mehiz“ (derived from the word „maize“) on the Cape Verde Islands. Corn, or maize, is indigenous to what is now known as Mexico, where it was cultivated by the Maya and Aztec. In some parts of West and East Africa, corn supplanted the roles of sorghum, millet and rice in local diets. It is versatile- eaten in the early stages of ripeness, boiled or roasted and even dried and ground for staples like ugali in East Africa and kenkey in West Africa. The continent of Africa is unique in that most of the corn it produces is consumed by humans, compared to North America and Europe where corn is used as livestock feed. However, corn monocultures and the diversion of corn toward biofuel production in the dual contexts of climate change and fickle global commodity markets pose risks to food security on the African continent.