When the Rains leave: Malawi’s hidden Climate–Migration trap

In Malawi, climate shocks do not just destroy crops; they trap the poor in place, forcing desperate choices between starvation and illegal border crossings.

By Collins Mtika

When the water came for Magrate Mustafa’s home in early 2024, it came without warning.

In Machinga district in southern Malawi, the floods arrived suddenly, sweeping through the low-lying fields where her family had grown maize for generations.

By the time the waters drained away, they had taken everything she owned. What remained was a cruel choice: stay and starve, or leave and risk whatever lay beyond the border.

Magrate is one of millions caught in Malawi’s climate–migration trap. In this trap, climate shocks do not propel the poor toward opportunity or safer ground.

They immobilise them. They bury families in deeper poverty, making the very act of migration, often their only lifeline, an impossible expense.

Malawi’s poorest households are too poor to adapt, too poor to migrate, yet exposed to climate impacts that make remaining in place increasingly unviable.

The result is a national paradox. Climate disasters uproot hundreds of thousands every year, but those who suffer most are the least able to move.

Instead, they drift between temporary displacements and slow suffocation: crowding into urban slums, seeking unsafe informal work, or making desperate, irregular border crossings into Mozambique, Tanzania, or Zambia.

What looks like mobility is in reality a cycle of immobility and entrapment. The scale of vulnerability is staggering.

According to government and UN assessments, an estimated 5.7 million Malawians, nearly a third of the population, faced acute food insecurity during the 2024–2025 lean season.

In the southern districts repeatedly struck by flood, drought and cyclone damage, displacement has become a regular, almost seasonal occurrence.

Yet Malawi’s version of climate mobility does not mirror the well-documented patterns in wealthier nations. There, climate-driven migration often triggers structured resettlement efforts, insurance payouts, or state-coordinated relocation. In Malawi, displacement is met not with support but with further precarity.

The crisis at Lake Malawi captures how climate vulnerability intersects with political decisions and infrastructure built for a different era. The lake, the third-largest freshwater body in Africa, has long been the anchor of lakeshore livelihoods.

But in 2024 it became an antagonist.

Water levels surged to their highest in decades, fuelled by intense rainfall linked to El Niño and heavy flows from Tanzania’s northern catchment. Homes, lodges and fishing beaches disappeared underwater.

But rain alone was not responsible. In 2019, the government raised the Kamuzu Barrage, the sole regulator of the lake’s outflow into the Shire River. The intention was logical: maintaining higher water levels stabilised hydropower generation, the source of 70% of Malawi’s electricity, and supported irrigation schemes downstream.

Climate change, however, had altered the equation. When the 2024 rains arrived, the raised barrage acted like a choke. Fully opening it risked catastrophic flooding downstream. Keeping it partially closed left lakeshore communities inundated for months.

Those communities revolted. Displaced families demanded compensation and relocation, accusing authorities of protecting power generation and commercial irrigation at their expense. Downstream farmers argued the barrage should remain tightly controlled to safeguard their fields.

Engineers estimated the barrage could safely discharge far more water than it did, but operators insisted they were balancing competing national interests. For the thousands who watched their homes drown, these explanations offered little comfort.

The dilemma at the barrage reveals a deeper truth: climate adaptation decisions in Malawi often carry hidden winners and losers, with the poorest bearing the heaviest costs.

That same dynamic is playing out across the country, where a devastating drought in 2023–2024 slashed maize yields by nearly half in the south.

Nationally, production fell 29% below the five-year average. What this meant on the ground was grimly simple. Families who thought they had good crops saw them fail in the final weeks.

Parents like smallholder farmer Tereza Langton feared they could no longer afford school fees. Communities that had weathered droughts before now had nothing left to sell, nothing left to pawn, nothing left to eat, and no resources to migrate.

Globally, climate research points to a consistent pattern: in high-income countries, rising temperatures increase migration. In low-income nations like Malawi, they reduce it.

Climate shocks destroy crops and livelihoods, but they also destroy the very assets – livestock, savings, and seed reserves – that households need to finance movement. Migration becomes a luxury. People who need to move most are least able to.

This immobility plays out in ways that compound Malawi’s fragility. Over the past decade, heat stress has increased, average temperatures have risen by 0.6°C, and the population has grown by more than 60% over 30 years.

Land pressure intensifies, particularly among youth, whose plots are shrinking and whose agricultural prospects are dwindling.

Many want to migrate for work. But with no capital, they remain in failing farms or drift to urban informal settlements, where opportunities are scarce and risks rampant.

Some push across borders anyway.

Flow monitoring along the Malawi–Mozambique corridor recorded significant movement during the height of the 2024–2025 food crisis, though true numbers are likely far higher given the shutdown of monitoring posts on the Tanzania corridor and security restrictions along the border.

Migrants in these streams face exploitation ranging from wage theft to gender-based violence. Women and children are particularly vulnerable, sometimes disappearing into trafficking networks. For many families, irregular migration is a forced gamble, the only alternative to starvation.

Remittances do help when they arrive, bolstering food security for relatives left behind. But because most recipient households use the funds for survival rather than investment, the underlying vulnerability remains unchanged.

Remittances fill stomachs, not financial gaps. And in a country where remittance pathways are collapsing, itself a story of economic crisis, even this limited safety net is weakening.

Malawi is not ignorant of the climate threat. The country launched its National Adaptation Plan process in 2014 and has pledged ambitious emissions reductions by 2040.

International partners have rolled out resilience programmes, including the World Bank’s Social Support for Resilient Livelihoods Project and the Global Center on Adaptation’s RESTORE initiative in the Lower Shire. These projects aim to strengthen safety nets, rebuild transport infrastructure and prepare communities for climate extremes.

However, a critical blind spot remains: human mobility is almost entirely absent from Malawi’s climate planning. A 2024 analysis by the Initiative for Climate Action and Development found that the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) barely references migration and includes no concrete commitments on climate-related displacement.

Because the NAP fails to integrate population movement, it also fails to plan for the inevitable.

Vulnerable households will continue to be displaced by climate shocks, and without structured relocation, they will continue falling deeper into poverty.

Experts say the omission is dangerous. Malawi’s land tenure reforms since 2002 could, in theory, support planned relocation for communities repeatedly affected by floods or drought, but this potential is largely untapped.

Regional labour agreements,  including the 2023 SADC Protocol on Employment and Labour, could protect Malawian migrants from exploitation but lack mechanisms that address climate-induced flows.

Even infrastructure decisions like barrage management need transparent frameworks so affected communities understand and influence the risks they bear.

Climate projections indicate that Malawi’s most damaging temperature increases will coincide with the growing season, amplifying stress on crops and livestock. Delayed rainfall onset will further threaten food production.

As one development economist working with the International Organization for Migration put it, “Climate migration in Malawi is not a choice. It is a survival strategy for people already living at the edge of destitution.”

Without deliberate, rights-based integration of human mobility into climate adaptation, Malawi will continue to oscillate between disaster and displacement, leaving millions stranded between unlivable land and unattainable escape routes. The rains will keep coming. The droughts will return.

And the poorest Malawians will remain trapped, not by the climate alone, but by the absence of a plan for what to do when the rains leave , and take everything with them.