Floods in Malawi

‘Share the Sun pro­ject’
Heavy floods hit Malawi in early Janu­ary 2015 af­fect­ing 638,000 people coun­try­wide, caus­ing loss of 104 lives and the dis­place­ment of 230,000 people. Farm­land and homes were sub­merged, for­cing people to move to high­er ground. A lot of fam­il­ies lost everything they owned. Sol­ar lights en­ables fam­il­ies to cook and pu­pils to do their home­work at night. Most of the af­fec­ted fam­il­ies use nor­mal cook­ing fire or candles for light­ing which is not only ex­pens­ive but also poses a fire risk. Asked about sol­ar lamps it was said, “We would love sol­ar lamps as they would give light­ing longer in the homes and are much more eco­nom­ic­al. We will no longer need to buy candles”.
Hab­it­at For Hu­man­ity Malawi dis­trib­uted 1000 WakaWaka sol­ar powered lamps donated by the WakaWaka com­munity through the Share the Sun hu­man­it­ari­an crisis pro­jects. The idea was to pro­mote the use of cheap­er sus­tain­able light­ing and elim­in­a­tion of the use of ker­osene lamps and candles which have massive health and en­vir­on­ment­al draw­backs. As most of the dis­aster-af­fected people had re­lo­cated from the camps, the dis­tri­bu­tions took place at re­lo­ca­tion sites: Layitoni 2 in Chikh­wawa Dis­trict and Kadyamba and Mo­tor En­gil in Nsan­je Dis­trict on 8th and 9th Septem­ber 2015.

More home­work hours at night to study
Mary Tch­uzi, a 14 year old girl from Layitoni 2 site who goes to school at Jombo had these words about WakaWaka lights, “With this sol­ar lamp I can do my school work for some hours at night rather than us­ing my fath­er’s phone torch which nev­er las­ted long and provided poor light­ing.” In the area, over 50% of the be­ne­fi­ciar­ies have school-go­ing chil­dren.