Local community loading tea leaves onto a truck. A person is up on the truck catching bag of tea while multiple people are throwing them from the group. There are tea leaves in piles on the grond.
Local community in Malawi loading up tea leaves after harvesting (Photo: nchenga nchenga, via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
Malawi was one of the first governments to sign up to the 2021 Glasgow Declaration for Fair Water Footprints and commit to delivering sustainable water and sanitation for all by 2030. At the beginning of 2025, representatives from Malawi presented the progress it has made against its pledge, particularly in the agricultural sector (alongside Belgium, the UK is its top export market for agricultural commodities) at an event at Chatham House in London.
“We have an unwavering commitment to promoting global accountability for water usage and for every water user to be aware of the effect of their actions on water security,” the Right Honourable Abida Sidik Mia, Malawi’s Minister of Water and Sanitation in the Malawi Government, told the event.
“Water shortage affects productivity in many parts of Malawi, leading to food and livelihood insecurity, to the point where some communities are forced to relocate.”
Reform and awareness
Joined by Tea Association of Malawi representatives and two farmers from Sukambizi Tea Association Trust, Mia talked about the challenges of making water stewardship part of everyday life.
At the policy level, she is pushing for governance structures and laws to change. A sanitation and hygiene bill is going through parliament, while reforms to regulate industrial and domestic water use are planned. The aim is to enforce water-saving measures and promote water-use efficiency, reducing unfair water footprints.
There is also ambition to raise public awareness of the issues around water use and its connection to increasing climate resilience. The minister sees many possibilities to work with other countries but seems frustrated at the pace of change.
“There’s huge potential to generate energy from hydropower dams either side of the Tanzania-Malawi border in the Songwe River Basin,” she said. “It would change the lives of 500,000 people, the local schools, hospitals, road systems, the nearby towns, but the project has been discussed for 22 years and nothing has happened!
“It’s not straightforward but I’m hoping that before the end of 2025 we will have closed the deal.”
Tonda Chinangwa, CEO of the Tea Association of Malawi, and Annie Khanyiwa and Edison Lowani, tea farmers from the Sukambizi Association Trust, then went on to provide insights from their day-to-day experiences.
Chinangwa outlined all that his members do to use sustainable agriculture practices: leaving prunings on the soil surface for protection, contour farming and rainwater harvesting, as well as creating buffer zones and water borders to ensure filters against runoff and erosion.
Some communities are collaborating with the Tea Research Foundation to manage local forests, which has reduced encroachment; firewood is gathered from old trees, leaving younger, healthier trees to thrive.
“In terms of being able to show the carbon footprint of our tea – we’re working on it!” he said. “And we definitely need to start telling the story of how tea fields sequester carbon.”
But there are significant challenges: tea estates may look picturesque but surrounding them is often heavily degraded land, resulting from poverty and population increase. The Tea Association of Malawi is working with smaller tea communities to set up programmes to encourage environmental protection.
Head and shoulders image of Annie Khanyiwa.
Head and shoulders image of Annie Khanyiwa.
A brief history of the Sukambizi Association Trust, by Annie Khanyiwa
I am a farmer and member of the executive committee of the Sukambizi Association Trust in Malawi. The trust was established in 2000 with 1,000 farmers and an average tea crop of 85,000 kgs/year. It was registered under the Malawi Companies Act in 2003, converted into a trust in 2008 and certified by Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance.
The organisation is composed of smallholder tea producers, divided into 29 blocks with an average of 0.3 hectares each. Each block is led by a committee of five members and these farmers are in Mulanje and Thyolo Districts.
Now Sukambizi has 2,710 hectares and 15,800 farmers. It produces an average of 16 million kgs per year. It receives an average premium of US$658,600 per year. With the premium Sukambizi gets from buyers, we have managed to do a number of things, including constructing a 35km water pipeline, building school blocks, under-five clinics, bridges, setting up a bursary scheme and providing an ambulance for farmers.
Of the 15,800 farmers, 70% are women and 30% are men.
What we expect in five years from now: Sukambizi Association Trust will be producing an average of 19 million kgs of tea per year and will have 18,000 farmers.
Edison Lowani emphasised how committed the trust is to ensuring that every community member has access to water. Building on Khanyiwa’s words, he told of how in 2019 the organisation had started on a water stewardship programme.
It had engaged the whole community in taking care of water points, built a better partnership with the government and done catchment management – planting trees where climate change impacts had led to trees dying or being destroyed. Every member of the trust was given 12 trees to plant each year and encouraged to establish wood plots.
Ninety per cent of farmers are now able to access safe water and have better water, sanitation and hygiene practices.
But the challenges are still many. These include the distance that must be travelled to find water sources (in their location, a long way up the hillside) to plant trees and the inadequate premiums farmers receive from fair trade buyers – he urged buyers to reconsider their pricing structures.
A few tea statistics
The water footprint of tea is 5m3 to produce 1kg of tea
Malawi ‘exports’ 217,000 m3/year of virtual water through tea
34 litres of water is used to produce every one cup of tea
What future support is needed across Malawi?
The ensuing discussion recognised the commitment of the Malawi government and tea producers to the Fair Water Footprints and also the challenge of engaging the wider private sector without the right incentives.
A valuable perspective from the tea farmers was that smallholders must be part of the water regulation design process, recognising important trade-offs and allowing some careful flexibility as opposed to complete rigidity.
Water is different from hard commodities – undervalued and poorly managed everywhere. There’s a need for strong leadership, which we have with Minister Mia.
Andy Roby, senior water security advisor, FCDO
Farmers needed technical advice and a better premium from trading partners to continue to comply with evolving regulations. And bearing in mind that typically, most tea farmers are women, a gendered perspective on support was essential.
“There has to be a win-win situation for businesses. Collaborative design of programmes will lead to greater ownership by farmers, with resulting positive progress,” said a participant.
The win-win desire applied to buying corporations too. Senior staff (ideally the chief executive and finance director) needed to appreciate the long-term impact on their business of poor water stewardship in the supply value chain, absorbing compliance costs, for instance, rather than passing them on to smallholders.
At government level, any trade agreement with a country such as Malawi needs to build in a fair trade element (and with overseas aid cuts announced after the event, support to enable this is potentially compromised).
Environmental stewardship is still an emerging issue; water stewardship has even further to go before its importance is widely understood. The transformative goals of the Glasgow Declaration for Fair Water Footprints have never been more critical.