Dear Malawi,

You share your country with one of the great lakes of the world. Lake Malawi is home to more than 350 species of mbuna, the rock-dwelling cichlid fish, and all but five are found nowhere else; UNESCO inscribed the national park on the World Heritage List in 1984. Eight in ten units of the electricity you generate come from renewable sources, most of them from the Shire River.

Much of the finance is already pointed at these gaps. The World Bank is financing electricity access, the Shire Valley Transformation Program for irrigation, education reform, water and sanitation, and social support for resilient livelihoods. In December 2023 it approved a budget support loan with a Catastrophe Deferred Drawdown Option, finance that can be drawn the moment a disaster strikes. That is an instrument built for a nation that floods and dries in turn.

The work ahead is plain, and it is worth saying plainly. Only two in every hundred of you cook with clean fuel. Only eighteen in every hundred of you drink safely managed water at home. Eighty-two in every hundred of you cannot always count on enough good food. Clean energy sets your Coverage today, at 2 out of 100, with water and food close behind. Each of them is within your reach.

The next step is to connect the clean power you make to the homes and schools that lack it, and to measure every operation by the household it reaches.

Now imagine that same resolve turned toward every home in the country. Picture Perfect Malawi: a morning when every family cooks with clean fuel and sits down to a full table; when every tap runs clean and every home has a safe toilet; when every child walks to a school where a teacher is waiting, and reads with ease by the age of ten; when every mother lives within reach of a clinic with the lights on, and every young person finds work that pays. And no Malawian falls below a decent life, because the nation has decided that none will.

“The lake gives you life in abundance. Let it light and feed every home.”

So this is an invitation. Bring your vision, your story and your solutions to the Perfect Malawi Design Studio, and join the Co-designers who are already imagining what comes next. Perfect Malawi will not be designed for you. It will be designed by you.