Description of the crisis
Malawi is one of the countries greatly affected by Tropical Cyclone Freddy, among others,
Mozambique, and Madagascar. On 4th March 2023, the department of Climate Change and Meteorological Services issued a warning informing the Malawi nation that FREDDY had developed into a Moderate Tropical Storm and was continuing to intensify in the Mozambique Channel and other models indicated that there was a likely high chance of FREDDY recurving towards Mozambique coast. Following the advisory, MRCS initiated an anticipatory action approach tailored to ensuring that the society is prepared in terms of prepositioning of stock, early action plans, and awareness raising on Early Warning to the communities, especially in the targeted areas. In the background, the team continued to monitor other global models to countercheck the prediction and probabilities of the forecast and lead times. The deployed MRCS National Response Team (NRT) targeted the highly projected districts which receive high rainfall amounts including Blantyre, Phalombe, Mulanje Thyolo, Chikwawa, Nsanje, and Zomba.
On 13th March, a state of disaster was declared in the 14 districts that were severely affected by the cyclone. On 17th March 2023 an Emergency Appeal was launched by MRCS through IFRC. The overall goal of the appeal is to enable 160,000 people (32,000 households) affected by TC Freddy in five affected districts (Blantyre, Chikwawa, Nsanje, Mulanje and Phalombe) to meet their essential needs in a safe and dignified manner, recover from the crisis and strengthen their resilience to future shocks. The government through DODMA made a declaration to close all camps by 17th April 2023, this came after a monitoring visit which showed that there were over 503 camps across the affected district, most of these camps were in schools, and as such they compromised learning.
To ensure that the decommissioning process was smooth, the government with support from other partners supported the decommissioning where some beneficiaries were given either Non-Food Items (NFIs) or cash as a return package.
Due to the magnitude of the impact, most vulnerable people are still struggling to recover from this shock although a smaller number of the affected households have managed to relocate to higher and safe areas. The intensity of the impact has been aggravated by the outbreak of Cholera, which has affected a number of districts.