President Bakili Muluzi has maintained an official
silence over a controversial campaign to change the constitution to allow
him to run for a third term in 2004, but opposition leaders are demanding
that he make his position known.

Funding to fight famine in Malawi has begun to trickle in, but it is still nowhere near what is required to prevent a humanitarian disaster, said aid agency CARE International.

Save the Children and CARE today announced a $1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to provide emergency food aid for more than two million people -many of them children- who are suffering from starvation in the southern African country of Malawi.

Weighed down by a critical food shortage,
limited access to land, unemployment and poor education and health services,
Malawi is one of the world's poorest countries. In a bid to win international financial backing to reverse its dismal record, the government this week launched a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) - a first step to gain unqualified relief on its US $2.5 billion foreign debt under the controversial Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative.

When the Malawian government introduced a policy of free primary education in 1994, school enrolments soared from 1.9 million to about 3 million. This massive surge has placed severe constraints on the financing of the primary school system. How can Malawi deliver universal primary education? Where will it find the new teachers it needs?