Mphatso Chitaukali: Fighting child malnutrition

Malawi faces both chronic and acute child malnutrition. According to Unicef, more than a third of children under five (approximately 35.5 to 37 percent) are stunted, reflecting long-term nutritional deficiencies, while wasting or acute malnutrition affects around 2.6 percent of children under five. These figures are startling.

And Mphatso Chitaukali has heard them for years. She has also learnt that malnutrition contributes to increased child morbidity and mortality, impaired cognitive development and long-term health consequences. “From my primary school days, we were taught that one of the underlying causes was food insecurity.

I said, ‘No, I can do something for my village with the little I was earning,’” she recalls. That realisation pushed Chitaukali to support a few children with fortified porridge every morning in her home village in Mulanje District. “I told myself that I didn’t need to wait for donors to come to my community and feed our children.

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I started doing that in 2020. During Covid-19, I went around villages in Mulanje identifying children who were in critical need because many families were struggling to put food on the table,” she says. During her visits, she encountered children showing visible signs of malnutrition.

Some were underweight, while others looked weak and lacked the energy expected of children their age. “It became something I could not ignore. Every visit reminded me there were more children who needed help.

So I started distributing porridge flour to households and for the children,” she says. The initiative, however, soon faced an unexpected challenge. “The flour had to be shared among everyone else in the family.

It wasn’t really reaching the toddlers the way I wanted,” she explains. Instead of giving up, Chitaukali thought about constructing a feeding shelter where children could gather every morning to receive nutritious porridge. “I thought if I had one place where children could come every morning, I would be sure they were eating the food.

I also realised I could reach many children at once,” she says. It was from this idea that the 43-year-old registered Rising Star of Mulanje as a charity organisation in 2023.

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