Malawi’s aid vacuum draws new actors

In February 2026, as Malawi’s government struggled to close a major funding gap in its annual lean-season response, a UK-registered Islamic charity moved quickly.

The Faizan Global Relief Foundation (FGRF) launched a Ramadan food distribution campaign targeting 100 000 vulnerable households across Malawi, an unusually large intervention for a non-traditional humanitarian actor in the country.

Ramadan 2026 in Malawi began on the evening of 17 February.

By early March, the organisation said it had already reached more than 20 000 households in five districts, from flood-prone Nsanje in the far south to Salima in central Malawi.

On one level, this is a straightforward story of charity stepping in where need is greatest. On another, it points to something larger and more unsettling: the weakening of the old aid order in one of Africa’s most aid-dependent countries and the rise of new actors moving into the space it leaves behind.

That matters because Malawi’s crisis is not only about hunger.

This landlocked southern African country has long depended heavily on foreign assistance to support food relief, public health and basic social services. When established donor funding contracts, the effects are immediate and concrete.

They show up in closed health posts, suspended maternal health programmes and a state that is less able to coordinate who is delivering aid, to whom and under what rules. 

The food emergency alone is severe. Malawi relies heavily on maize, its staple food and repeated climate shocks and economic strain have pushed millions into insecurity.

An Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis published on 17 October 2025 found that about four million people, 22% of the assessed population, were facing acute food insecurity at IPC Phase 3 or worse between October 2025 and March 2026.

About 8 000 were classified in Phase 4, an emergency level requiring immediate life-saving support.

National maize production for the 2024-25 season was estimated at 2.9 million metric tonnes, against a national requirement of 3.7 million, according to the ministry of agriculture.

Following his return to office after winning the September 2025 presidential election with 56.8% of the vote, President Peter Mutharika declared a state of disaster on 25 October in 11 districts and extended it nationwide in November.

The government response has been significant but underfunded. Malawi’s lean season food insecurity response programme, the emergency plan designed to help people through the annual pre-harvest hunger period, was costed at 209.4 billion kwacha.

By late February 2026, the Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DoDMA), the state agency coordinating the response, had mobilised approximately $85.5 million, leaving a gap of about $34.1 million.

The World Bank provided the largest single share, at $45 million, for maize purchases from Zambia. The United States, Norway, Japan, the United Kingdom and Ireland, among others, contributed through the World Food Programme and other partners.

DoDMA cautioned that the published figures did not include donations made directly to affected communities without formal declaration to the department and urged all recipients of donations to publicly account for the resources they had received.

But food relief is only the most visible layer of a deeper financing crisis.

For years, Malawi’s development model rested on external support. The United States alone has been providing more than $350 million a year, representing more than 13% of the national budget, according to the US Department of State. Foreign donors contribute over half of healthcare spending in the country.

When the Trump administration froze USAid-funded programmes in early 2025, the effects were swift: 20 health posts shut down across the country, more than 4 500 health workers and support staff had their contracts terminated and maternal health initiatives were suspended.

When that external support falters, the system does not simply slow. It fragments. And where it fragments, other actors move in. FGRF is one of them.

Registered with the UK Charity Commission under charity number 1200869, the foundation is the charitable wing of Dawat-e-Islami, a Pakistan-based Sunni Islamic movement founded in 1981 in Karachi.

The movement describes itself as non-political and focused on welfare.

FGRF now operates in several countries, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa and Tanzania. It has also built a growing international profile. In 2024, it received the Great British Care Award for its humanitarian services.

Its UK head, Syed Muhammad Faisal Sami, was named UK Volunteer of the Year 2024 by Charity Today and later Humanitarian of the Year at the Influencer Magazine Awards 2025.

The organisation is not new to Malawi. It was among the early responders after Tropical Storm Ana in late January 2022, delivering aid worth $250 000 and receiving official recognition from the government.

But its current role marks a significant shift. This is no longer a one-off emergency intervention but a more visible and sustained presence in welfare provision.

In November 2025, FGRF distributed 1 500 bags of flour worth 20 million kwacha in Mangochi district. In January 2026, it delivered food to nearly 2 000 people in Luchenza, in Thyolo district and donated 15 hospital beds worth 60 million kwacha to the maternity ward at Chonde Health Centre.

By late February, its Ramadan campaign had expanded across Nsanje, Thyolo Thava, Salima and Mangochi, distributing packs containing maize flour, rice, sugar, cooking oil, salt and soya pieces.

The organisation is also signalling that it intends to stay. Its communications officer, Ibrahim Mataya, said the foundation plans to distribute hybrid seed for planting, provide blankets in winter and roll out economic empowerment programmes in additional districts.

Its Malawi head, Muhammad Osman Madani, described the group’s work as a two-track intervention: emergency relief for households and practical support for overstretched public services.

That matters because it suggests that organisations such as FGRF are no longer operating only as supplementary charities. 

They are moving into spaces where the state is weak, traditional donor systems are thinning and communities need visible, immediate help.

Unsurprisingly, local political leaders have welcomed that support. Mary Navicha, Malawi’s minister of gender and a member of parliament for Thyolo Thava, said close to 60% of households in her constituency lacked a reliable food supply and that she had personally approached FGRF for assistance.

Other local leaders have publicly praised the foundation and called on more organisations to follow its example. None of that diminishes the material importance of the aid. In districts where hunger is acute, delivered food matters more than theory. But that cannot be the end of the analysis.

The deeper question is what happens when relief provision expands faster than the systems meant to coordinate and monitor it.

When DoDMA published its February 2026 resource update, it noted that the figures did not include donations delivered directly to communities without formal declaration. It urged all aid recipients to publicly account for the resources they had received.

That is not a bureaucratic footnote. It goes to the heart of the governance problem.

This problem is not unique to FGRF. It is built into a humanitarian field that is becoming more crowded, more decentralised and harder for the state to fully see. 

Malawi’s Non-Governmental Organisations Regulatory Authority (NGORA), established under the NGO Amendment Act of 2022, requires NGOs to register before operating.

But even within the formal system, coordination is already under strain. A 2024 study published in Health Policy and Planning found that 166 financing sources and 265 implementing partners were already complicating health-sector coordination in Malawi.

That was before the latest donor retreat accelerated the entry of new humanitarian actors outside the traditional Western-led aid architecture.

This is where Malawi’s story becomes part of a wider regional trend. Across sub-Saharan Africa, the contraction of USAid and other Western funding streams is redrawing the humanitarian map.

Moving into that space are Gulf donors, transnational faith-based organisations and other non-Western actors whose capacity to deliver is often very real but whose accountability systems do not always fit neatly into established multilateral norms.

For recipient states, this creates a difficult trade-off. On the one hand, these organisations can move fast, reach neglected communities and provide help when formal systems are delayed or absent.

On the other hand, weak reporting standards and limited integration into national coordination systems can deepen fragmentation and make it harder to track what is being delivered, by whom and with what longer-term political or social effects.

Research on faith-based organisations in Africa has long highlighted this dual reality: they are often trusted, locally embedded and highly effective at the point of service delivery but they also test the limits of oversight in states already struggling with institutional capacity.

Malawi now sits squarely within that tension. The donor vacuum is already being filled. 

The real question is whether it will be filled by a more plural and accountable aid system or by a more fragmented one.

Collins Mtika is a veteran journalist and the Mail & Guardian’s special correspondent in Mzuzu, Malawi. He is also the director of Centre for Investigative Journalism Malawi.