Florida Kunyambo, a widowed mother in Nsusa Village, Traditional Authority (T/A) Kapeni in Blantyre, shares a fragile hillside home with her unemployed son, 28. The house made of sun-baked bricks is almost everything for them—like many families priced out of Blantyre’s soaring rental market. A 2024 study by the Centre for Social Concern found that Malawi’s lowest-paid civil servant needed to save 30 percent of their income for 23.3 years to build a K12.6 million house.
This pushes the likes of Kunyambo to known disaster zones, including hillsides hit by mudslides and flash floods caused by Cyclone Freddy in 2023. The world’s longest-running cyclone displaced 61 000 people in Blantyre, leaving 212 confirmed dead and 75 missing. The mudslides ripped Kunyambo’s house, burying foodstuffs, clothes and other valuable items in the rubble.
“The raw brick couldn’t withstand the relentless rainstorm,” she recalls. Kunyambo spent eight months in a congested emergency camp. During the period of displacement, her relatives sourced funds to repair the house.
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“We moved in by December 2023, but rains kept soaking and eroding the mud bricks. I feared that the house would fall again,” she states, In December 2024, she wrapped the risky walls in a plastic sheeting to safeguard them walls from battering rains. Kunyambo is among 181 Tadala and Tithandizane care group members who received plastic sheets from Malawi Red Cross Society for effective disaster risk management and interagency anticipatory action.
“I no longer need to worry about heavy rains and the cost of constant repairs,” she says. Six groups in Blantyre and seven in Phalombe qualified for the group cash transfers from Red Cross. The humanitarian organisation supported the formation and training of the groups, which wrote proposals for low-cost projects to improve disaster preparedness and resilience of the populous settlements in Chilobwe and Ndirande.
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