For 27 years, the Dzaleka refugee camp in Malawi has been the closest thing Marriam Habimana has had to a permanent home. A 30-year-old Burundian refugee and single mother of three, she has built her family’s survival around one certainty: the monthly food assistance from the UN World Food Programme (WFP).
Since the establishment of the camp in 1994, WFP has been providing food to maintain and improve the nutrition of refugees and asylum seekers. Originally, WFP provided in-kind food assistance. It shifted to cash transfers in January 2021, to allow families greater flexibility.
“But over the last couple of months, the money has become less and less,” Habimana explained. “There are reports that we will not receive any support by the end of June if the WFP is unable to raise money for the programme.”
She said she used to receive rations worth USD 100 per month but that’s now USD 7 – “which is not even enough to buy a bag of maize to sustain me and my children for one month.” In Malawi, USD 7 will not quite buy four loaves of bread.
Located 50 km north of the capital Lilongwe, Dzaleka was established by the Malawian government and the UN refugee agency UNHCR to shelter a maximum of 12,000 people fleeing regional conflicts.
Today, it is a sprawling, overburdened settlement. According to UNHCR, the camp contained 52,000 people by the end of 2024. The vast majority of them are women and children from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi and Rwanda.
Many families’ stay in the camp has long depended on the assurance of the next distribution cycle. But over the past three years, that stability has steadily evaporated. Habimana has watched her cash assistance drop precipitously.
In May, the refugees received messages warning about the possibility of further reduction or suspension of food and cash assistance, due to a severe shortage of funding from international donors.
What is happening to Habimana is by no means an isolated case. “Global humanitarian needs are outpacing available resources,” explains Hyoung-Joon Lim, WFP’s Malawi country representative.
Malawi’s humanitarian system has been stretched thin in part by years of climate extremes. Across Southern Africa, repeated droughts, destructive floods, and failed harvests have pushed aid agencies into permanent crisis mode and forced difficult decisions about who receives help and who is left to fend for themselves.
A compounding crisis
In the last few years, the country has been battered by back-to-back disasters: Cyclone Idai in 2019; Storm Ana in 2022; Cyclone Freddy in 2023; immediately followed by a severe El Niño-induced drought in 2023 and 2024; and then cyclones Chido and Jude in 2024 and 2025.
This year, the country is reeling yet again after severe localised flooding struck the southern and central regions between 15 and 18 March, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Citing data from the national Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DoDMA), it said the water destroyed 34,100 hectares of vital cropland, threatening food security.
The human toll is staggering: 37 people dead, 233 injured, and over 368,000 people affected. More than 26,000 households were displaced into 84 temporary camps.
Yet, as the floodwaters rose, the financial reservoirs meant to save these communities ran completely dry.
DoDMA, which is implementing the three-month 2026 National Flood Response Plan (spanning April to June), says it requires MWK 48.8 billion (USD 27.9 million). Currently, only MWK 2.7 billion has been mobilised, leaving a paralysing gap of MWK 46.2 billion.
Triage and the sacrifice of the future
During the critical October 2025 to March 2026 lean season, when food stores from the previous harvest have run out and the new harvest is not yet available, an estimated four million people in Malawi were projected to face acute food insecurity.
“WFP has only been able to provide food assistance to one million vulnerable people against the original target of 2 million people due to funding shortfalls,” admits Lim of WFP. “WFP is sharpening its targeting and maximising every dollar received.”
This is the grim reality of modern humanitarian triage. When resources are insufficient, agencies are forced into agonising calculations. Priority is strictly assigned to life-saving interventions for the most critically vulnerable.
This focus on immediate survival comes at a devastating long-term cost. Resilience-building programs, designed to break the cycle of poverty and climate vulnerability, are the first to go on the altar of budget cuts.
“Critical interventions such as school meals and integrated resilience activities are facing significant funding shortfalls,” Lim notes.
Without these funds, thousands of children risk losing the daily nutritious meals that keep them in classrooms, and smallholder farmers are stripped of vital climate-smart agricultural support. According to WFP, their “Zero Hunger Village” approach, meant to build self-reliance through local nutrition actions and livelihood diversification, is being stalled just when it is needed most.
“The frequency and intensity of climate impacts suggest that reactive funding mechanisms are no longer sufficient on their own. Malawi’s experience demonstrates the need for predictable and flexible resourcing,” Lim explained.
The cost of the last mile
The rapid transition from prolonged, baked-earth dry spells to intense rainfall means the ground cannot absorb the water. Such “climate whiplash” does not merely increase the number of people in need; it destroys the infrastructure required to reach them. Feeder roads are eroded, bridges washed out, and key trunk roads severed.
“These access constraints have required flexible logistics planning,” Lim explains. To navigate the deteriorating conditions in hard-hit districts like Nkhotakota and Mangochi, WFP has had to deploy specialised 4×4 and 6×6 trucks. Without these, “some communities would simply not be reachable,” he says.
When ground access vanishes entirely, agencies are forced to use boats or helicopters. These were heavily relied upon during the Cyclone Freddy response. Clearly, climate volatility drives up the cost of delivering aid, ensuring that every dwindling donor dollar buys less physical relief than the year before.
Responder burnout and “forced self-reliance”
Behind the multi-billion-Kwacha deficits and logistical nightmares lies a profound toll on the responders themselves. The front line of this crisis is not manned exclusively by parachuting international aid workers, but by a network of over 86,000 community-based Malawi Red Cross volunteers.
“These individuals are currently buckling under severe physical and emotional exhaustion,” said Felix Washon, a Malawi Red Cross spokesperson. “They are operating in an environment where they are both victims of drought-induced crop failures and the first responders called to manage flood evacuations in their own backyards.”
“This proximity creates a deep sense of responsibility and solidarity; responders are not ‘deploying elsewhere,’ they are protecting their own homes and neighbours,” says Maina Kingori, roving humanitarian director for CARE International.
The dynamic creates a troubling operational overlap. Kingori said that because shocks are rapidly sequenced, resources originally positioned for post-drought recovery, such as seeds and livelihood inputs, are diverted to serve as emergency relief for flood victims.
The humanitarian system is cannibalising its own long-term recovery efforts just to survive the present week.
As external investment shrinks, community resilience is eroded. Kingori refers to this as a shift toward “forced self-reliance,” where impoverished households are pushed to repeatedly draw on depleted coping strategies. Communities are left to rebuild flood defences, such as dykes, using fewer materials, less technical oversight, and at massive personal cost.
Evictions without a safety net
Nowhere is the harshness of this self-reliance more evident than in the Malawi government’s approach to displacement camps.
Facing an overwhelming MWK 11.7 billion (USD 6.7 million) deficit for the emergency response to the floods, DoDMA recently began decommissioning 13 camps in the Nkhotakota district.
DoDMA Commissioner Wilson Moleni assured the public that the government is providing “recovery packages”, including maize, beans, salt, buckets, and heavy polythene sheets for roofing. But the underlying truth is apparent: the state simply cannot afford to maintain the camps.
For some survivors, leaving is a necessary step toward normalcy.
“If we don’t go now, we cannot cultivate, we will have no food and we will remain dependent on government support,” said Samuel Pensulo, a flood survivor desperate to resume his livelihood.
But for others, returning home means returning to a void.
Eighty-year-old Zelifa Phiri lost her entire home to the floodwaters. Now, standing outside a decommissioned camp with a plastic sheet in her hands, her options are limited. “I have no alternative but to build a makeshift shelter,” she said quietly. “We still need people to hold our hands. I have no one to rely on.”
Agnes Petulo, another displaced mother, summarised the impossible bind facing tens of thousands of Malawians: “We cannot live forever in tents on the ground. We need proper homes.”
However, proper homes require funding. DoDMA is currently grappling with a separate MWK 148 billion (USD 85 million) deficit in its Lean Season Food Insecurity Response Programme, despite piecemeal corporate donations like a recent MWK 210 million contribution from First Capital Bank.
A system on the brink
The consensus among humanitarian leaders on the ground is unanimous: the traditional, reactive funding model is obsolete. Waiting for a disaster to strike before passing the hat around the international community will fail in an era of compounding extremes.
Strategic survival in Malawi and Southern Africa more broadly now demands anticipatory action, the early release of funds ahead of shocks based on early warning thresholds, and multi-year financing to ensure continuity for resilience investments. Without this fundamental shift in donor behaviour, the cycle of vulnerability will only deepen.
Until that shift occurs, the burden will continue to fall squarely on the shoulders of the marginalised. From the 80-year-old grandmother building a makeshift plastic shelter in the mud of Nkhotakota, to Marriam Habimana staring down a month with zero food rations in the sprawling confines of Dzaleka camp, the human cost of the humanitarian aid freeze is already here.
