Agriculture

It is obvious that Agriculture still dominates the economy with a share of about 36% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) while smallholder production of subsistence crops accounts for the bulk of this. Weather changes lead to frequent flooding and droughts making it very difficult for smallholder farmers to make ends meet. The use of single hoe for farming and lack of capacity to farm at a larger scale using improved variety of crops and inputs such as fertilizer makes it worse and creates the dominant trend in the shortfall of national food production. Much as New Restoration Plan supports the government effort to address food security through free distribution of free farm input per acre, the practice is not sustainable enough. Having distributed free inputs to poor communities over the years, NRP has engaged itself in a new gear. It is training smallholder farmers to engage themselves in sustainable agricultural practices such as diversity in crop production through irrigation, livestock production, poultry and fruit farming. NRP is in the process of selling its idea to acquire tractors and water pumps which it will hire out to community farmers’ clubs to maximize crop production and ensure food security and sustainable income at household levels.

Health Care

Malawi has the worst and crude death rate in the whole of Africa sticking at 24.48% per 1,000. Life expectancy has fallen from 51 to 48 years with the maternal mortality rising from 620 in 1992 to 1,120 to-date per every 100,000 live birth. This is due to various reasons ranging from shortage of medical drugs in public (government) hospitals and dispensaries. There have been reports of high levels of pilferage of drugs by health workers. Despite having produced a good crop of doctors and nurses, Malawi's health workers choose to migrate to other countries in search of greener pasture due to poor working conditions in the country. Latest reports indicate that one doctor/health worker attends to nearly a thousand patients a day. New Restoration Plan runs different parallel activities within the health care program. These are: 1. HIV & AIDS prevention and Advocacy: To mitigate the impact of HIV and AIDS in our communities which has seen Malawi's prevalence rate drop sharply from 14% to 9%. We conduct Advocacy Programs on AIDS. The overall objective of this program is to fight and stop further spread of HIV and AIDS hence reduced number of premature deaths, reduced number of orphans, eliminate transactional sex and introduce increased acceptable livelihood alternatives in the communities. There are nearly one million orphans out of a 13,000,000 Malawians of which over 70% is as a result of AIDS related deaths. Other diseases that claim more lives of children in Malawi are malaria, tuberculosis, malnutrition due to poor diet, diarrhea, dysentry and cholera due to poor sanitation conditions and consuming untreated water. New Restoration Plan supports a total of over 2000 orphans in three centers 2. Water Supply & Sanitation Program: To ensure that poor households have access to clean water for consumption and an adequate means of sanitary waste disposal. In social terms, pollution, particularly feacal contamination, has contributed to the spread of diarrhea, cholera, typhoid and bilharzia leading factors to high morbidity and mortality rates in our communities. This phenomenon has brought severe economic costs in terms of health expenditure and low human resources productivity. We encourage communities to treat water before drinking or use it for cooking and also to treat all places where mosquitoes can breed and transmit malaria. New Restoration Plan indeed has plans to build at least three clinics in three districts of Blantyre, Kasungu and Chikwawa.