Anaemia during pregnancy is a public health concern, yet the relationship between household food insecurity, dietary intake and anaemia among pregnant women remains underexplored. This cross-sectional study investigated these associations in 612 second-trimester pregnant women attending antenatal care in Lilongwe, Malawi. Household food insecurity was assessed using the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS), dietary intake via the Semi-quantitative Food Frequency Questionnaire (SQ-FFQ) and anaemia defined as Hb <10·5 g/dL. Results showed that 21·24 % were anaemic, and 69·93 % resided in food-insecure households. Severe food insecurity (adjusted OR (a-OR): 2·58, 95 % CI 1·41–4·71), insufficient intake of energy (a-OR: 1·73, 95 % CI 1·13, 2·66), Fe (a-OR: 1·98, 95 % CI 1·21, 3·24) and vitamin C (a-OR: 1·71, 95 % CI 1·12, 2·59) were significantly associated with a higher likelihood of anaemia, whereas those with a Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDD-W) had a substantially reduced risk compared with those with low dietary diversity (LDD) (a-OR: 0·19, 95 % CI 0·06, 0·61). Dietary diversity partially mediated the association between household food insecurity and anaemia among pregnant women. Findings underscore the need to promote food security, dietary diversity and nutrient intake through targeted health education and staff training. These strategies could reduce anaemia prevalence and improve maternal health outcomes.

The procedure for mandatory reviews, also known as confirmations, has existed in Malawi since the colonial period. It requires that when a subordinate court convicts a person and imposes a punishment that passes a prescribed threshold, the case record be forwarded to a higher court for review. This article examines the evolution of this procedure in Malawi from the colonial era to how it is being currently understood and applied. It argues that the understanding that courts have recently attached to the procedure does not align with how this procedure has historically developed. Moreover, this understanding diminishes the procedure’s effectiveness in its function of protecting convicts’ rights. The article suggests ways of improving the procedure to ensure it remains relevant and suitable for the purpose for which it was originally established.

Voters and politicians often blame tallying irregularities on fraud, undermining perceptions of democratic and electoral credibility. Yet such irregularities also result from capacity failures and human error. We introduce several methods to assess competing causes of tallying irregularities leveraging the quasi-random administration of polling stations. Using these methods, we revisit the case of the 2019 Malawian presidential election which was famously canceled by the High Court due to widespread result-sheet edits and accusations of fraud. Contrary to the dominant consensus, we do not find evidence that edits were motivated by fraud or that they benefited the incumbent. Instead, we show that edits increased in proportion to the complexity of filling in result-sheets, suggesting a dominant role for human error. In addition to reinterpreting a historically important election, we also make the case that policy efforts to improve electoral credibility could productively be reallocated towards electoral administration rather than anti-fraud measures.

This pilot cross-sectional study, conducted in two public hospitals in Malawi, assessed gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) in pregnant women attending antenatal clinics and compared their dietary quality and food group consumption before and during pregnancy. The study targeted women aged 18 to 49 years within 24 to 28 weeks of gestation. GDM was diagnosed according to the International Association of Diabetes and Pregnancy Study Group criteria and assessed dietary quality before and during pregnancy using a 30-day qualitative food frequency questionnaire. We compared changes in dietary quality and specific food group mean scores using paired t-tests at p < 0.05. Of the 508 women enrolled, 22.7% were diagnosed with GDM. The overall diet quality significantly decreased during pregnancy compared to before; a similar trend was observed in women diagnosed with GDM compared to those without GDM (p < 0.0001). Among women with GDM, the mean score of the following food groups significantly (p < 0.05) decreased during pregnancy: cruciferous vegetables, deep orange vegetables and tubers, citrus fruits, deep orange fruits, other fruits, nuts and seeds, poultry, fish, low fat dairy, whole grains, and liquid oils and significantly (p < 0.05) increased in the following food groups; red meat, processed meat, sugar-sweetened beverages, sweets, sugary snacks and ice cream. In conclusion, GDM is prevalent in Malawian women enrolled in this study and is coupled with inadequate dietary quality, especially during pregnancy. Since dietary quality is pivotal to GDM management, more in-depth longitudinal dietary studies are needed to inform nutritional interventions to prevent and better manage GDM.

Climate-smart agriculture that promotes climate change adaptation and mitigation while improving livelihoods is being advocated to smallholder farmers. Most studies in this area focus on the yield and income impacts of practices, but we explore farmer well-being impacts. Using a multi-criteria analysis embedded in an in-person questionnaire, our findings suggest that smallholder farmers in Southern Malawi have diverse preferences for climate-smart practices based on location, access to markets and resources and importance placed on climate adaptation. The use of multidimensional well-being criteria provides deeper insights into the motivations and priorities of farmers, revealing trade-offs between immediate food needs and climate adaptation concerns, as well as between the need for incentives versus the risk of conditional credits. Our study calls for tailored climate-smart agriculture projects that allow farmers to adopt practices that meet their needs.

This study explores the potential of applying machine learning (ML) methods to identify and predict areas at risk of food insufficiency using a parsimonious set of publicly available data sources. We combine household survey data that captures monthly reported food insufficiency with remotely sensed measures of factors influencing crop production and maize price observations at the census enumeration area (EA) in Malawi. We consider three machine-learning models of different levels of complexity suitable for tabular data (TabNet, random forests, and LASSO) and classical logistic regression and examine their performance against the historical occurrence of food insufficiency. We find that the models achieve similar accuracy levels with differential performance in terms of precision and recall. The Shapley additive explanation decomposition applied to the models reveals that price information is the leading contributor to model fits. A possible explanation for the accuracy of simple predictors is the high spatiotemporal path dependency in our dataset, as the same areas of the country are repeatedly affected by food crises. Recurrent events suggest that immediate and longer-term responses to food crises, rather than predicting them, may be the bigger challenge, particularly in low-resource settings. Nonetheless, ML methods could be useful in filling important data gaps in food crises prediction, if followed by measures to strengthen food systems affected by climate change. Hence, we discuss the tradeoffs in training these models and their use by policymakers and practitioners.

This piece explores the parallel development of two fisheries management regimes in mid-twentieth-century Lake Malawi: one imposed by the British colonial government over the lake and the other by Senior Chief Makanjira focused on Mbenji Island. The parallel development of these regimes provides opportunity for close analysis of how fisheries management centred on different knowledge and practices led to distinctive legacies of governance legitimacy and efficacy. Given the increasing recognition that Indigenous knowledge is crucial to the future sustainability of fisheries globally, we contend that it is imperative to recognise the ways in which colonial pasts have embedded knowledge hierarchies and exclusionary decision-making processes within national fisheries governance regimes that continue to obstruct capacities to bring different knowledges, practices, and management approaches together effectively and appropriately.

The export of ornamental fishes from Malawi has received limited attention regarding its sustainability or the conservation status of any threatened species involved in this trade. To identify any species that require specific management actions, we used a negative binomial regression model to examine the relationship between the number of exported fish and year of export, adjusted for fish prices and the number of fish exporters. We also examined the correlation between export volume trends and the conservation status of fish species. We identified three groups of fish species based on their export volume trends: species with no trends, with decreasing trends and with increasing trends. There was no significant correlation between export volume trends and the conservation status of fish species. The export volume trends of individual species appear to be related to the number of exporters, price and, potentially, anthropogenic factors affecting fish populations. Based on our findings we recommend the inclusion of ornamental fishery management issues in a revised Fisheries and Aquaculture Policy. This should include strategies to control overexploitation of species with declining export volume trends, and conservation of threatened species and a ban on their export. We recommend further research to establish the population status of the exploited fish species and to identify any other factors linked to the volume trends of ornamental fish exports.

Chiefs in Malawi exercise significant authority based on legitimacy derived from the position's purportedly deep historical origins. But, does such legitimacy confer when a new chieftaincy is created from scratch? I address this question within the context of an ongoing cultural revival of the Lhomwe ethnic group in Malawi, which has included the appointment of many new Lhomwe chiefs and the creation of a Lhomwe paramount chieftaincy. Using a combination of in-depth interviews and original survey data, I explore the political drivers, mechanisms and implications of the this newly created Lhomwe chieftaincy. I find that its creation was driven by top-down, elite-led action rather than citizen demands, and that the newly appointed chiefs enjoy the most support among urban-based backers of the political party responsible for their appointments. This research contributes to historical work on the colonial-era creation of chieftaincies, but does so using a contemporary case of cultural engineering.