It has been nine months since Cyclone Freddy, the longest-lasting tropical cyclone ever recorded, struck Malawi twice in six days. The cyclone triggered floods and landslides across the country, killing more than 1,000 people and displacing nearly 700,000. For Grace*, a 29-year-old subsistence farmer from Najawa in the ravaged southern Machinga district, the damage was life-changing.
“The water destroyed our home and our crops. I had one acre of maize and two plots of rice, but I harvested nothing,” she says. “Everything washed away.”
In desperate need of food, Grace began selling sex for the first time in her life. Today, on the banks of Lake Chiuta, where fishermen are selling their catches of chambo (tilapia) and milamba (catfish), she is looking for new clients among the traders and their customers.
“It’s scary, but I do it because I have no other means of finding money for survival,” she says. “I have three children who depend on me, and my parents as well.”
Grace is not alone. She is one of several women in Najawa, a village of just over 1,000 people, who have been selling sex since Cyclone Freddy wiped out their farms. In Malawi, women make up 70% of the agricultural workforce and often bear the responsibility for household food security. After the cyclone destroyed 1,790 sq km (440,000 acres) of farmland, many have had to find other ways to provide for their families.
“All natural disasters have a gender-bearing, and it is women who bear the brunt of them,” said Caleb Ng’ombo, director of People Serving Girls at Risk, a Malawian organisation working to protect young women and girls from sexual exploitation.
According to his staff, the number of women working in prostitution has “almost tripled” since Cyclone Freddy, he says. The organisation has provided counselling to 187 young women and girls in 2023, up from 56 in 2022.
“They want to put food on the table,” says Ng’ombo. “Some of them thought there was safety entering prostitution because they could earn a living.”
But a living is not guaranteed, and neither is safety, says Ng’ombo. The women in Najawa charge just 2,000 Malawian kwacha (about 95p) for a night with the client, or 500 kwachafor “a short time”, but many of their customers become aggressive after having sex and try to pay less, while some refuse to pay at all. Others demand unprotected sex.
In Malawi there is also little understanding about the legal status of sex work. It is not illegal but related criminal offences are often used as a reason to target, harass and arrest sex workers, which makes it difficult for women to report any crimes against them to the police.
Natasha* says: “We try to negotiate for safer sex, but some hostile customers deny it, so we just accept though we don’t know their [sexual health] status.
“A lot of the time we meet customers who have drunk alcohol and they become violent and abuse us in one way or another. But because we want money to buy basic needs for us and the children, we give in.”
Pauline Kaude, of Malawi’s gender ministry, said the government was rebuilding infrastructure and housing to help women affected by the storm restore their livelihoods, but she agreed that Cyclone Freddy had increased poverty and worsening food insecurity had led to a rise in sex work.
“[Women] are failing to afford school needs and resources for their dependants,” she says. “Most young girls have left school for employment or marriages or selling sex for money to survive.”
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In 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted rising temperatures would make tropical cyclones wetter and more intense, and in the last few decades Malawi has experienced erratic rainfall, droughts and an average increase in temperatures of 0.9C (1.62F) because of climate change.
According to the most recent Global Climate Risk Index, Malawi is now among the five countries worldwide that are most affected by extreme weather events. With winds in excess of 160mph (260km/h), Cyclone Freddy was the equivalent of a category 5 hurricane and the strongest tropical storm ever recorded. Rainfall exceeded 600mm (24in).
Dickxie Kampani, principal secretary at Malawi’s Ministry of Agriculture, says: “Climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, making it difficult for communities to recover before the next disaster strikes. In such a scenario, it becomes crucial for Malawi to adopt proactive measures that focus on building resilience.”
Kampani emphasises the need to reduce dependence on agriculture. More than 16 million Malawians subsist on rain-fed agriculture, and are vulnerable to losing their livelihoods to climate disasters.
To improve resilience, the government recently committed almost $20m (£16m) to a five-year project, supported by the UN Development Programme, to help 10,000 rural households adopt more climate-resilient livelihoods, such as beekeeping, mushroom cultivation and producing sustainable briquettes.
Such opportunities could help keep women off the streets when natural disasters such as Cyclone Freddy strike in future, but any women who have already been affected do not know where to turn for help.
At a bar far from her home, Natasha is looking for another client. “If I find assistance somewhere, be it from the government or anyone, I will stop,” she says.
* Names have been changed to protect identities
