An hour up the craggy paths that follow Mulanje Mountain’s Likhubula River, the trail opens into a clearing, where water cascades over rock into a pool below. Natural forest fringes the pool, from where clear water streams out quietly, some of it feeding pipes that travel 55 km to Blantyre city, where it supplies over 300,000 residents.
There are many legends about the pool and the mountain – sacred as they are to the local people that live around them. Landson Story, a tour guide in the area for the past 15 years, recalls one such:
“In the ancient days, whenever drought and disease visited the community, elders would assemble here and offer a sacrifice of traditional brew and maize flour to the gods. They would then descend into the pool to bathe, a final act of cleansing their community.”
This ritual gave the pool its name, Dziwe La Nkhalamba (the Pool for Elders). It forms part of the cultural heritage that led Unesco to recognise Mulanje as a world heritage site in July 2025.
And yet, behind the designation exists a familiar controversy between extractive development and cultural and natural value. While one department of the Malawian government took Mulanje to Unesco as a place of great sacred and cultural significance, another was moving to license part of it for bauxite mining.
Mining and heritage on a collision course
Days after the Unesco declaration, a private Malawian mining firm wrote a letter of complaint to the Ministry of Local Government, Unity and Culture. It accused the body of failing to consult with the Mining and Minerals Regulatory Authority, which had granted the company exploration rights for a part of the mountain. “[The declaration] is aimed at stifling and depriving the significant progress our mining project has made over the last seven years,” reads the letter of 2 August 2025, signed by Akatswiri Mineral Resource’s chairman, Hilton Eneya Banda.
Situated in southeastern Africa, Malawi has a poverty crisis, with the fourth-lowest GDP per capita of any country, according to the World Bank. To strengthen the fragile economy, the government has championed an investment approach combining agriculture, tourism, mining and manufacturing. It launched this “ATM&M” strategy in 2021, seeking to create jobs, improve food security and generate foreign exchange. Mulanje Mountain holds no small stake in this policy. It’s a tourism hotspot and the origin of at least seven perennial rivers that supply water for domestic use, mini-hydro energy plants and the irrigation of crops in villages and estates below. And of course there is the disputed issue of the proposed mining.
According to trade media outlet AL Circle, the Mulanje bauxite project would cost USD 820 million, and on top of mining would include refining the ore into alumina and smelting that into aluminium, generating USD 260 million annually. In his letter, Banda stated it would reduce Malawi’s imports of aluminium products, create 2,265 direct jobs and give 7% of its profits to preserving cultural monuments on the mountain.
The letter stated that the mining authority had, in 2023, authorised Akatswir’s application for a 15-year mining licence on condition the company provide an environmental and social impact assessment (ESIA) report. That report, which the letter describes as “finalised”, would itself need approval from the Malawi Environmental Protection Authority for a mining licence to be granted.
When Dialogue Earth asked Banda on 29 April 2026 about the progress of the ESIA, he said he did not see the value of the public knowing more.
A state speaking in two voices
A July 2024 report that Malawi’s culture department presented to Unesco, reviewed by Dialogue Earth, suggests the country’s mining and heritage authorities have been working at odds with each other. For instance, by the time Akatswiri says it began its mining exploration on the mountain in 2018, the culture department had made three unsuccessful applications to Unesco for Mulanje to become a world heritage site. The first for it to be declared a natural heritage site, then as a mixed cultural and natural site and finally a cultural site, before last year’s breakthrough.
Further, while the mining authority advanced the prospect of mining on the mountain, a management plan that the country’s museums department published in January 2024 highlights resource extraction among the threats to the landscape, adding that the mining of bauxite or other minerals would adversely affect biodiversity and the area’s status as a biosphere reserve. “Given this uncertainty, the plan is being prepared on the assumption that the mining will not go ahead,” reads the document.
Dialogue Earth has reached out to both government departments but has received no response.
If mining proceeds, it could weaken the credibility of Unesco protections and encourage development in other biodiversity hotspotsCharles Mkoka, Executive Director, Coordination Union for Rehabilitation of the Environment
Carl Bruessow, executive director for Mulanje Mountain Conservation Trust (MMCT), which served as secretariat for the Unesco nomination committee, told Dialogue Earth that structural changes at the government office in charge of mining contributed to the coordination conundrum. When the committee was putting together the application, he explained, they wished to confer with what was then the Department of Mines but “there was no real way to talk to them because they were transforming the department into the Mining and Mineral Resources Authority [sic].”
Bruessow added that studies have found mining and processing Mulanje bauxite would be a complex and expensive undertaking. One done for a previous project proposal found that to operate the aluminium smelter would need additional electricity, possibly imported from Mozambique. A ropeway would also need to be built to carry materials down the mountain, as well as a railway to a town about 24 km away. That is why there has been a lack of interest from major global companies, according to Bruessow.
“Akatswiri already had no mining project brief about what they intend to do, who is going to finance it and what the development plan is. We have something that is not looking at due process,” he said. “We, as MMCT, respect that the government has a development agenda. In some projects that are progressing, we will have good benefits,” he added.
The USD 820 million capital cost of the project would likely necessitate international investment. In November 2024, Banda, the Akatswiri chairman, was quoted in local media as saying the company “would have loved if we raised the resources in Malawi so that Malawians can wholly own the project”.
In December 2025, he told Dialogue Earth that the project would proceed “with or without the Unesco declaration”. He added: “We will use Malawi laws, not Unesco laws.”
Communities divided
The conflict has not remained confined to ministries and boardrooms. It has also split communities around the mountain.
About the same time that Akatswiri wrote its August 2025 letter, 10 village heads petitioned the Office of President and Cabinet protesting the Unesco listing, citing economic benefits from mining, reported the Nation. Days later, five senior chiefs held a press conference dismissing the move by their junior counterparts. “This mountain is not ours to sell or exploit recklessly. It must be preserved for the future generations,” said senior chief Nkanda who holds jurisdiction over several villages run by village heads.
The Nation reported one of the chiefs who had “signed” the petition saying her official stamp had been used without her knowledge. Another signatory, Robert Patrick, told Dialogue Earth that since the declaration, there has been tension in his community and he has suffered verbal attacks as a majority opposes the mining. “We are torn apart in a war between who is sharing information and who isn’t. The mining company told people what they [will] get. But there has been silence on what this Unesco approval means to us, which is worsening fears that it will restrict our access to a mountain that has been a source of our livelihood and cultural wisdom for ages,” he said.
Not an isolated conflict
Such a clash between a Unesco world heritage designation and an extractive project is not unique.
In Zimbabwe, a coal-mining project has courted controversy for operating in the Mapungubwe world heritage site. In Eswatini, authorities withdrew a Stone Age ochre mine from the world heritage nomination list in favour of reviving iron ore production.
When Unesco and four other global organisations assessed 266 world heritage sites last year, they found parts of 97 had been approved for exploring or producing oil, gas and minerals.
Environmentalist Charles Mkoka believes Malawi should pivot towards conservation-based economic models like climate finance and eco-tourism.
“If mining proceeds, it could weaken the credibility of Unesco protections and encourage development in other biodiversity hotspots, whereas a decision to prioritise conservation would strengthen global norms that safeguard ecologically critical areas under growing pressure from resource demand,” said Mkoka, who is also executive director of the Coordination Union for Rehabilitation of the Environment, a coalition of environmental NGOs in Malawi.
Chikomeni Manda, managing partner of local mining consultancy Perekezi ASM Consultants, said Malawi should adopt a “forest-smart approach” – where mineral extraction preserves environmental integrity. In Mulanje, mining would be in a specific location, and with strict regulation, could potentially co-exist with conservation, he said. “That, however, begins with government departments speaking to each other. With ATM&M [agriculture, tourism, mining and manufacturing] strategy, departments cannot continue to work in competition like we have seen,” he stressed.
For its part, Unesco is unequivocal: “World Heritage sites should be declared as no-go areas for extractive industries to preserve their Outstanding Universal Value,” it says in its 2025 report.
That is the contradiction now hanging over Mulanje: a mountain Malawi presented to the world as worthy of protection, even as another arm of the state wants it to be mined.
