Our Stories

During a recent visit to Chiwamba Health Center in Malawi, USAID’s Assistant Administrator for Global Health, Dr. Atul Gawande, met Angelina Yona - and learned how USAID investments in Malawi's primary health care system helped to protect both Angelina and her daughter's lives.

Fatinesi Beliyamu is a 23-year-old farmer living in Kasiya, a rural community in central Malawi. Five years ago, Fatinesi dropped out of school because she was unable to afford the school’s fees.

As part of the recently announced $2.76 billion in U.S. government funding to address the global food crisis, USAID provided $12 million in new resources to Malawi to protect vulnerable populations from the escalating crisis exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

The Secondary Education Expansion for Development (SEED) Project is a $90 million partnership between the GoM and the U.S. government (USG) to increase access to secondary schools and reduce HIV risk for adolescent girls and young women.

The U.S. Government, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), is helping to strengthen Malawi’s health sector with the launch of four new nutrition support and malaria elimination programs. The projects carry a combined value of up to $127 million (approximately 130 billion MWK) over five years.

LONG-TERM development planning is crucial to USAID’s core mission of promoting and demonstrating democratic values, and advancing a free, peaceful, and prosperous world. In line with this, USAID/Malawi has launched its 2020–2025 Country Development Cooperation Strategy (CDCS) at special virtual events with its major stakeholders:  the Government of Malawi, fellow donors, civil society organizations, and the private sector. 

Citing widespread irregularities in Malawi’s 2019 presidential elections, the country’s Constitutional Court annulled the race in early February and ordered a rerun. Some of the most common irregularities cited by the judges included obvious errors in filling out electoral forms and the use of correction fluid to change mistakes. Questioning the integrity of the results, Malawians took to the streets to protest the election results and to demand greater transparency in the electoral process.

Until recently, “PPE” was an obscure acronym for many people, but now it has become a vital commodity globally. Today, with the realities of COVID-19, health workers around the world are experiencing a troubling shortage of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) – a mix of items including gloves, mask, aprons, and goggles that can help prevent  disease transmission in health care settings.

With new schools being built by USAID and PEPFAR, more girls and boys in Malawi will have improved access to education.

Since 2016, one program that Manes depends on is Tipindule ndi Ulimi - a weekly program developed by the USAID-funded Feed the Future Malawi Agricultural Diversification (AgDiv) activity. AgDiv provides information about how to improve production of soybeans, groundnuts (peanuts), and orange fleshed sweet potatoes.