By Elijah Banda
El Niño has become one of the most disruptive forces shaping food security in Malawi. The 2023/2024 season, driven by an intense El Niño-Southern Oscillation event, left large parts of Southern and Central Africa gripped by drought, wilting maize before it could tassel and pushing millions toward hunger. Malawi, a country where over 80 percent of the population depends on rain-fed smallholder agriculture, felt this shock acutely. Recently, Meteorologists have warned of a high probability of a strong El Niño event this year, with below-normal rainfall expected in the Southern Region between October and December, and a heightened risk of prolonged dry spells stretching into early 2027.Yet the conversation about El Niño preparedness in Malawi has focused almost entirely on infrastructure: irrigation schemes, dam construction, and early warning systems. These investments matter, but they are incomplete without a parallel investment in people. Adult education, particularly practical, community-based learning for farmers, extension workers, and rural households, is an underused lever that can determine whether hardware-based solutions actually translate into resilience on the ground.
Why Adult Education Matters for Climate Adaptation
Most Malawian farmers did not learn to farm in a classroom. Their knowledge was passed down through generations, built around rainfall patterns that El Niño and broader climate variability have now upended. Adult education, delivered through structured but participatory formats, gives farmers a way to update that inherited knowledge without discarding it. It teaches them to read seasonal forecasts, interpret climate advisories, calculate planting windows around erratic rains, and evaluate new varieties or practices for themselves, rather than waiting for instructions to trickle down through a thin extension network. Because it engages adults where they already are, in their fields, cooperatives, and village groups, this form of education tends to change behaviour faster and more durably than top-down technology transfer ever has.
Lessons from Elsewhere in Africa
Malawi does not need to invent this approach; it needs to scale what has already worked next door. In Zambia, the SCRALA project used farmer field schools to help thousands of farmers build resilience against climate shocks during the same 2023/2024 drought that battered Malawi, giving participants practical skills to protect crop and livestock production even as rainfall failed. Across Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, a coalition of researchers and extension agencies trained hundreds of local facilitators, a third of them women and more than half youth, in a blended Climate-Resilient Farmer Field School model that combines conventional agronomy, climate-smart practices, and indigenous weather knowledge in one adult learning package, explicitly aimed at improving how farmers make decisions under climate risk. In Ghana's drought-prone north, farmer field schools have been paired with locally developed climate action plans, giving smallholders both the knowledge and the organisational structure to act on it collectively. And in Angola, El Niño-hit communities in Cunene, Huíla, and Namibe have used field schools to rebuild sustainable agricultural production and improve household nutrition in the aftermath of severe drought.
Across these examples, the pattern is consistent: adult education is not a side activity bolted onto climate response, it is the mechanism that makes the response work. Continental estimates suggest more than 20 million African farmers have already passed through farmer field schools, gaining not just higher yields but a measurably improved ability to cope with extreme weather. That scale of impact was not achieved by any single irrigation scheme or seed variety; it was achieved by investing in how adults learn and make decisions.
What This Means for Malawi
Malawi already has the institutional bones for this kind of investment. The Ministry of Agriculture's extension system, agricultural cooperatives, and NGO-run adult literacy programmes could all be adapted into delivery channels for climate-focused farmer field schools, rather than treated as separate, uncoordinated efforts. Three priorities stand out. First, extension officers themselves need refreshed training in climate risk communication and participatory adult learning methods, since they are the frontline translators between meteorological data and farmer decision-making. Second, adult education content should be built around Malawi's specific El Niño exposure: drought-tolerant crop management, water harvesting for supplementary irrigation, post-harvest loss reduction, and interpretation of seasonal forecasts issued by the Department of Climate Change and Meteorological Services. Third, and most importantly, this education must be explicitly linked to environmental stewardship, teaching farmers not only how to survive the next drought but how to reduce the deforestation and poor land-management practices that intensify it, so that adaptation efforts do not simply shift the burden onto the next El Niño cycle.
Irrigation infrastructure will remain essential to Malawi's climate resilience, but pipes and canals cannot decide when to plant, how to conserve soil moisture, or when to intervene against emerging pests under a shifting climate. Those decisions rest with millions of individual farmers, and their capacity to make good ones is a direct function of the education they receive. If Malawi integrates adult education more deliberately into its El Niño response, drawing on proven models from Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana, and Angola, it stands to convert its considerable investment in physical infrastructure into resilience that farming households can actually use, season after season, regardless of what the rains bring.