Lilongwe City is booming. Houses are rising from the sand mined from rivers around it.
Charcoal produced in neighbouring forests, including Dzalanyama, is powering homes.
But both the sand and the charcoal are deprving the city a vital resource: potable water.
The sites of sand mining may be isolated, but their impact is joint. Sand extraction sites, multiplied hundreds of times upstream, are helping choke rivers that keep Malawi’s capital alive.
Just as sand mining has boomed, charcoal production has increasingly grown in forests around the city.
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Both activities are driven by ordinary people. They are for their survival. But this survival economies are assiduously dismantling the city’s water lifeline.
When taps run brown—or dry altogether—across Lilongwe, officials have often blamed it on heavy rains and the water utility body. But we have also established that the crisis begins far upstream, deep inside the degraded Dzalanyama Forest Reserve, where unchecked age-old deforestation for production of charcoal, which is in high demand in the country, and rampant sand mining along streams that bear down from the reserve, among others, are undermining the Lilongwe River’s ability to supply safe water to more than a million people.
Government officials, engineers, and environmental scientists have told Malawi News that the destruction of Dzalanyama is no longer an abstract environmental concern. It is a direct threat to the capital’s survival.
Spanning more than 934 square kilometers along Malawi’s western border, Dzalanyama is one of the country’s most critical water catchments. Streams descending from its hills converge into the Lilongwe River, which supplies over 80 percent of Lilongwe City’s potable water.
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But our visit to Dzalanyama found the forest suffering. It is ravaged by illegal charcoal production, agricultural encroachment and sand extraction.
Recently, widespread water shortages in the city triggered public outrage, forcing Minister of Agriculture, Irrigation, and Water Development Roza Fatch Mbilizi to tour Lilongwe Water Board (LWB) facilities.
She confirmed that degraded catchments were overwhelming water treatment systems.
“The increased sedimentation load has overwhelmed treatment works, leading to clogging and reduced production capacity,” Mbilizi said.
She warned that unless tree cutting along riverbanks and inside forest reserves stops, such crises will become more frequent and more severe.
LWB acting Chief Executive Officer Maclenan Nyang’wa said the Lilongwe river level rose considerably due to runoff from stripped catchment, submerging some equipment and reducing pump efficiency.
“At the treatment plant, clogging affected operations, resulting in reduced production,” he said.
Engineers estimate that when turbidity spikes, treatment output can fall by 30 to 40 percent. Yet, at the same time, cost for water treatment soars.
In communities bordering Dzalanyama, residents admit the forest and rivers are under siege, but they insist that unavailability of livelihood alternatives leaves them few choices.
Public health expert Maziko Matemba warned that highly turbid water does not only increase water treatment costs but also raises the likelihood of waterborne disease outbreaks if systems fail.
Water, sanitation and hygiene (Wash) experts said the crisis exposes years of neglect. In his research paper, ‘Scaling Climate-Resilient Wash Investments to Secure SDG 6 and 2063 Targets’, Wash specialist Willies Mwandira estimates that the country needs annual Wash investments of K622 billion up to 2030. Current spending stands at about K285 billion.
“Water investment is largely donor-funded,” Mwandira notes.
Civil society groups have said Dzalanyama’s collapse has long been predicted. Despite laws protecting forest reserves and rivers, enforcement remains weak.
LWB spokesperson Chisimo Chibwana said the water supplier is pursuing long-term solutions, including catchment protection programs and studies to draw water directly from dams to treatment plants via conveyors—reducing reliance on polluted river flows during the rainy season.
