What's New

Malawi has a history of peaceful democratic transitions. Since the advent of multiparty politics in 1994, power has regularly shifted between rival parties. Citizens and institutions have upheld electoral democratic norms, from respecting term limits to rerunning elections after irregularities.

Hunger and food crisis have reached catastrophic levels in multiple places around the world, according to the Global Report on Food Crises Mid-Year Update. Famine has been confirmed in the Gaza Strip and the Sudan, with parts of South Sudan at risk of famine and Yemen, Haiti, and Mali experiencing catastrophic levels of hunger.

In all, 1.4 million people faced IPC Level 5 (Catastrophe) food insecurity and hunger as of August 2025.

Drought, unpredictable rainfall patterns, high and rising food prices, and continued conflict and internal displacement are driving acute food insecurity in Mozambique. A new IPC alert released last week reports that between April and September 2025, more than 2 million people have experienced IPC Level 3 food insecurity and 143,000 people have experienced IPC Phase 4 food insecurity and malnutrition.

While declining globally, hunger continued to rise across Africa in 2024. An estimated 307 million people in the region, or more than 20 percent of the region’s population, experienced hunger, according to the 2025 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report. This was up from just under 19 percent in 2022 and from 17.4 percent in 2019 before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2015 when the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal Agenda was released, hunger has increased in the region by 113 million people.

Livestock supports the livelihoods of around 1 billion people in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) (Thorne and Conroy 2017, Baltenweck et al. 2020). However, growth and productivity of the livestock sector in many LMICs are not keeping pace with the increasing demand for animal-source foods. Boosting the sector’s productivity is crucial for poverty reduction in LMICs, which continue to face multifaceted challenges and shocks that threaten the sustainability of food systems. This, in turn, requires reliable livestock data for informing livestock policies and investments.