It is never easy for a girl in Mangochi to make it to secondary school.
In 2023, Anne Funiwelo, 17, felt like a superstar when she was selected from Malembo Primary School to Nchema Secondary School in the lakeside district.
From Monday to Friday, Anne, from Chilimba Village in Traditional Authority Mkumba, braves an hour-long walk to school.
“This is a walk to a good future,” she says.
Anne grapples with hunger and poverty as her mother and father separated when she was young.
Her mother struggles to fend for the girl and siblings.
The situation worsened early in 2024 when drought caused by the El Nino weather patten scorched crops across the Southern Region.
“I often missed classes because my mother couldn’t afford my school fees [K30 000 per term] and daily meals,” says Anne. “The headteacher sends me home until I settle the school fees balance. This affects my performance in secondary school.”
Just last year, her mother had to sell household property to keep Anne in school until she sat Junior Certificate of education examinations.
The emotional stress of having an absent father, seeing her mother struggle and skipping classes also affect Anne’s performance.
This makes her a regular at Malembo Children’s Corner, one of the 141 centres established by the Ministry of Gender, Children, Disability and Social Welfare in 2013 with support from Unicef.
“I love coming to the children’s corner in my area to socialise and forget my problems,” she sighs with relief.
Child protection worker Jacklyn Beluti says these centres provide a safe space for children aged six to 18 to come together, play games and discuss their rights.
She states: “The meetings empower them to feel safe and open up about their worries, which reduces the risks of violence, abuse, exploitation and neglect within the community.
“Children who frequent children’s corners know their rights and grow up concentrating on important things like education. This also allows us to screen children who have been experiencing issues of violence, abuse and exploitation. They learn how to identify and report rights violations and abuses.”
The social workers encourage children in poverty not to give up on their future, but work hard to excel in school and overcome their financial hardship.
District senior social welfare assistant Samuel Chitseko says Mangochi has recorded 856 cases since January this year.
He says long walks to school remains a huge barrier to education in rural communities.
The long distances and climate-related disruptions in food production force children to drop out of school.
During last year’s El Nino episode, the Southern Region suffered extensive crop failure, which left over 5.7 million people in need of food aid amid economic instability, hyperinflation and rising food prices.
On March 23 2024, President Lazarus Chakwera declared a State of Disaster across 23 of the country’s 28 districts.
Widespread food insecurity triggered a 50 percent rise in child protection violations in affected districts, according to the Ministry of Gender, Children, Disability and Social Welfare.
In response, Unicef, with funding from the European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (Echo), rolled out an initiative to strengthen integrated emergency response to nutrition, health and child protection crises in the worst-hit districts of Mangochi, Nsanje, Chikwawa, Balaka, Machinga, Phalombe, Mulanje, Chiradzulu, Zomba and Salima.
“Through the project, we are working with the social welfare office in mental health and psychosocial support and gender-based violence [GBV] prevention and response the children’s corners, among others,” says Unicef child protection officer Martin Nkuna,
He says over 20 000 caregivers and frontline workers were trained to provide psychosocial support and GBV response services for the benefit of children affected by El Nino.
