Stories

Our Team Leader has once again sounded the alarm over Malawi’s rapidly dwindling groundwater resources, echoing the stark warnings in the latest Annual Economic Report. With an estimated 85% of Malawians relying on groundwater for their daily needs, the report exposes an alarming reality: available water per capita has fallen from 1,102 m³ in 2023 to just 1,044 m³ in 2024. We’re now hovering dangerously close to the internationally recognised water-scarcity threshold of 1,000 m³ per person per year. This just validates the point that groundwater is a threshold resource—meaning it places a hard limit on our socio-economic ambitions at both local and national levels. It doesn’t matter how much we dream in colour about a middle-income future: the less of this resource we have, the less likely we are to realise those ambitions at all.

This isn’t just a statistic to file away in a report. It’s an unmistakable warning of an approaching crisis that will reshape lives, livelihoods, and entire communities. Without urgent and coordinated action, we face a future of failing boreholes, dry taps, and the slow erosion of rural water security.

We can’t keep drilling more and more boreholes with complete disregard for replenishing what we’re taking out. We cannot keep installing solar-powered irrigation systems all over the country without thinking about whether the groundwater resource can actually meet that demand. We can’t keep installing hand-pump fitted borehole systems without the supervision of a qualified hydrogeologist or water resources engineer to guide or advise whether a hand-pump should actually be placed in that particular location. We can’t keep ignoring the anecdotal evidence of wells that used to run throughout the year now going dry, or rivers that used to flow year-round now reduced to seasonal trickles. We can’t keep doing this and expect anything other than collapse.

Even the government is sounding the alarm. The Annual Economic Report itself calls for immediate reforms—investing in water harvesting structures, scaling up managed aquifer recharge, and implementing serious policy and financing changes to protect our water future. These are not abstract recommendations; they are a survival strategy for a country on the brink.

We cannot keep ignoring this. We can’t keep pretending that someone else will fix it. The real crisis is our indifference, our collective tendency to normalise scarcity until it becomes catastrophe.

We still have time to act—but only if we choose to do so now.

✅ Read about our Team Leader's comments on the Annual Economic Report here: https://mwnation.com/water-shortage-looms-with-dwindling-sources/
✅ Revisit BASEflow’s 2017 early warning about groundwater depletion here: https://youtu.be/D3i3450CDY4?si=gR6Rfc3IzqJB47yz
✅ Learn what you can do, right now, to be part of the solution here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWf0tXZmUPY