“I look at the learners I work with as brothers and sisters. In the end, they trust me with their day-to-day ideas and challenges,” says Precious Kasangu, a youth facilitator based at Mponera Community Day Secondary School (CDSS) in the Dowa district. The school is one of 10 pilot schools participating in the FutureLife-Now! Programme.
Prior to the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic on 12 March 2020, an event in Malawi involving a handover from a donor would have been a large-scale ceremony and included ministers, government officials, donors and members of the community.
The small-scale event pledging COVID-19 emergency protective materials to the ministries of Education and Health in Malawi, although no less valuable, illustrated the “new normal”. The event took place on 22 September 2020 at the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MoEST) headquarters in Lilongwe.
The scourge of COVID-19 might have disrupted the lives of individuals, societies and governments across the world, but the partners of the Future Life-Now! programme determined that they would not allow the pandemic to halt communication, training and support in the 10 FutureLife-Now! pilot schools. Instead, an effective e-platform was established at all 10 schools in Malawi.
According to the United Nations, the COVID-19 pandemic is a health and human crisis threatening the food security and nutrition of millions of people around the world. MIET AFRICA’s regional programme, FutureLife-Now!, recently provided food parcels to vulnerable learners and their families in Malawi through its humanitarian emergency COVID-19 response project.
As climate change specialist, Dr Donald Kamdonyo has noted recently, “climate change has been recognized as one of the biggest challenges that humanity is facing today,” and negatively affects socio-economic sectors across countries. (Malawi Gears Up to Adapt to Climate Change -September 25, 2019). As a primarily agricultural economy that has seen numerous climate-related disasters in recent years, the government of Malawi is well aware of the implications that climate change has for the population’s livelihoods and development. Climate change adaptation is a key priority for the government and numerous civil society organizations “to increase the resilience of its vulnerable population and ecosystems.”
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