Malawi

You are called, with real affection across the region, the Warm Heart of Africa — and the name has outlasted nearly everything a small, landlocked, deeply poor nation has been made to carry through almost no fault of its own.

In March 2023, Cyclone Freddy sat over your southern region and refused to leave. The World Meteorological Organization later confirmed what your rescue workers already knew from thirty-six exhausting days on the ground: no tropical cyclone in recorded history has lasted longer. More than 679 of your people did not survive it. Nearly 660,000 were displaced from homes many are still rebuilding. The United Nations priced the recovery at roughly $700 million — a bill for a storm you did almost nothing to cause, in a country whose citizens each emit, on average, a fraction of a ton of carbon a year.

The storm did not arrive alone. Within months your currency had been devalued by 44 percent overnight, an emergency correction to a foreign-exchange shortage years in the making. Inflation climbed past 30 percent. An IMF program signed in good faith in November 2023 quietly ran out of runway eighteen months later, having disbursed barely a fifth of what was approved. None of this is a story you asked to star in.

And yet — you held an election in September 2025, and when the incumbent lost, he conceded, and power changed hands peacefully, the way it is supposed to and too rarely does. Your farmers, working plots that in a fairer year could feed a far wealthier country, held steady through a fertiliser program that reached 1.75 million households in a single season. Your lake — the third-largest in Africa, home to more fish species than almost any other body of water on the planet — kept doing what it has always done, indifferent to the exchange rate.