Life in Zambia: job-shadowing in malawi

During the past week EWB sent me off to Malawi, Zambia's neighbour to the east. The purpose of my trip was to visit my colleague Anna-Marie Silvester in Lilongwe (Malawi's capital city), who is currently partnered with an international NGO called CNFA. The CARE-ADAPT agro-dealer project (the project that I'm currently seconded to, with CARE International - as I discussed in a past blog post) is almost identical to a project that is currently winding down with CNFA. Both ADAPT and CNFA are funded by AGRA (Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa), and are both attempting to develop commercially-driven agro-dealer networks in rural areas to improve smallholder farmer access to agricultural inputs. Other than the difference in NGO's, the differences between the two nations stands out to be the most significant contrast between the two projects.

Despite sharing a fairly open border, having similar languages, and both maintaining peace, Malawi and Zambia differ in many ways. Though smaller in size, Malawi has a larger population. The people have different mannerisms, art (music, fine arts, and movies/TV) is appreciated in different ways, and within the context of agric development projects, smallholder farmers depend on different crops to sustain their livelihoods and operate on different terrain and types of soils. For example, tobacco is an extremely abundant and important crop in Malawi. As I rode the bus into the country, almost all the farming households that I passed had large racks of hanging tobacco leaves to dry. However; in Zambia, only in Eastern province (the province that borders Malawi) is tobacco significant.

As the only other country I have visited apart from Zambia, I have realized the richness in differences and the uniqueness of cultures within individual sovereign nations: grouping and referring to all countries within the continent simply as "Africa" is flawed and sometimes considered offensive to locals.

It was a delight getting to go out into the field and having many interesting conversations with Anna-Marie's Malawian colleagues at CNFA. I took home many lessons (staff capacity, monitoring and evaluation, organizational learning, etc...) that I can apply to my work for CARE-ADAPT.

I must say Malawi is an absolutely beautiful nation with so much heart, full of pride, and so much potential. It's no surprise as to why EWB decided to make impact in this wonderful country.