T E A M Malawi at Virginia Tech

09/15/2025

We would love to take this time to celebrate some of our partners across Malawi. Our work is possible because of the strong partnerships with these excellent people and institutions on the ground. You inspire us!

Congratulations to MUST and the Bingu School of Culture and Heritage for opening a campus radio! Intellect on Air!

Congratulations to Victor Kamwendo for completing the first phase of revitalizing CBCCs in the rural west region of Lilongwe. We visited this site during our last student trip!

Congratulations to our colleague from Thyolo District Hospital, Ephraim Ziwoya, on continuing your graduate education at Oxford to work on water management systems!

Congratulations to the students of Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices at MUST for your continued dedication to serving the public by utilizing your art skills to generate new public healthcare messages! Thank you!

Congratulations to the team at MicroMek for advancing 3D printing from recycled bottles, representing tech businesses across Africa, and continuing to push the production of radio transmitters and receivers in low resource areas!

09/05/2025

Thank you to Ida Puliwa Mwango, director of the Othakarhaka Foundation in Mulanje, Malawi, for speaking with our student group tonight at Virginia Tech. Thank you for sharing your Malawi success story and inspiring so many people by “passing on the kindness.”

06/20/2025

21 Young Women Graduate a Life-Changing Drone Tech Training in Malawi because of MicroMek! Check out the blog post with more on this great story of success!

The MicroMek Drones4STEM program received an overw...

06/05/2025

Day 10 & 11: Radio silence while we embarked on a visit to Liwonde National Park with time to enjoy the amazing protected landscapes that are unique to Malawi. We had a great safari ride in a Land Cruiser and by boat. Might save our time up close with the animals for another post! On Sunday, most folks went to Mangochi to visit Lake Malawi. As Ruth’s grandfather said, you haven’t been to Malawi if you haven’t been to the lake. The warm heart of Africa is the land of the lake.

Day 12: We returned to Blantyre by way of Zomba for happy shopping. Our last official stop on the trip was the city campus of MUST to meet with Vice Chancellor Malata and colleagues across the MUST administration and the Bingu School of Culture and Heritage. Thank you for your partnership across arts, technology, education, advocacy, and medicine in Malawi.

With a night and a home cooked meal with Ruth’s grandmother, we packed for the last time and made the long journey back to the United States.

05/31/2025

Day 8: Thursday was our last full day in Blantyre. At MicroMek, the drone group marched on with the workshop and loved the mentorship aspect of working with the tech savvy girls. The hydroponics team finished up their prototypes and made small balls out of local clay to stabilize plant roots. And the plastics recycling team ensured how to move forward when we returned to Blacksburg so we can replicate the system from here. Our new born hearing screening team demonstrated their prototype for the audiologist at Mercy James Pediatric Surgery Hospital and received enthusiastic feedback. Out at Thyolo District Hospital, we pushed hard to finish as many murals as possible, working on a total of 10 over two days. The evening was capped off with a goodbye celebration at Chinyonga guest house with our partners from MicroMek and MUST. It was hard to say goodbye to our dear friends and colleagues. The student researching food security even helped in the kitchen to cook our delicious meal of regional foods. Thank you to everyone who has been a part of this productive week in southern Malawi. We couldn’t be more grateful for your care and your time.

Day 9: Friday was a travel day with a brief meeting at the Zomba District Health Office. Now we are safely settled at Liwonde National Park for the weekend.

05/29/2025

Day 7: TEAM Malawi is deep into our co-designed projects with the IKSP student group from MUST, MicroMek, and regional hospitals. We had fantastic weather for a service day at Thyolo District Hospital. We partnered up across schools and worked on repairing more healthcare murals. Art is good for the soul! We had one team visit Queen Elizabeth Hospital to understand the challenges faced by hemodialysis patients in Malawi. And our dedicated drone team members visited the African Drone and Data Academy and delivered a public health workshop for MicroMek’s current STEM for girls program. Every night we are nourished by the great chefs at Chinyonga. We are very lucky people!

05/28/2025

Day 5 & 6: We have had two productive days with our partner institutions around Blantyre. Our drone team helped kick off a workshop at MicroMek. Our hydroponics team is deep into building prototypes. Our BME teams have visited Kamuzu University of Health Sciences and with the executive team and MUST’s Academy of Medical Sciences. Our health communications team had an informative meeting at the headquarters of the Malawi Institute of Journalism. We’ve visited sacred places of worship, gathered supplies for our service days, and enjoyed the sunset at Chinyonga Guest House each night. We are so grateful for our partners and our time in the warm heart of Africa to advance these amazing co-created projects.

05/26/2025

Day 4: TEAM Malawi works in partnership with a number of Malawian organizations, with one of the most fruitful being MicroMek in Blantyre. This tech company is the only of its kind, including the engineering of drone technology for the medical industry. We met with them to discuss the status of our mutual projects, such as hydroponics for supplemental nutrition and transforming recycled plastic into 3D printer filament. We also shared across teams the success we have had in the last year on new initiatives like recycled paper products, radio technology, medical device development/maintenance/ testing, and healthcare communications. Monday morning the MicroMek staff launches a three week workshop to train Malawian girls in drone technology in which students from TEAM Malawi will contribute learning modules about the drones and implications in public health.

As the workshop leaders took the final hours of the afternoon to prepare, the rest of the team hiked a peak outside of Blantyre called Michiru Mountain. The natural beauty of Malawi is precious, we enjoyed the rigorous hike. Sometimes hard things take you to the most amazing places. Thank you is given to our guides Gift Voigt and Chimwemwe Mlauzi.

05/24/2025

Day 2: on Friday, May 23, we visited two villages in rural west Lilongwe. The first was Chingalire, a village with a visionary chief, Ben Mankhamba. He has opened a home stay facility with a diverse set of activities and income opportunities for the people in his community including a lodge, theater, school, banana plantation, honey bees, a bamboo makerspace, workshops on regional food, music, and much more. It was a wonderful tour, dance demonstration, and freshly cooked lunch for the team.

In the afternoon we visited with MUST student, Victor Kamwendo, at his home village of Ntchentche. We were invited to a community meeting in which we listened to the community’s concerns for the Community Based Childcare Centers (CBCCs) that need resources to open properly. Serving well over 2000 children, the centers have volunteer teachers, structures in need of repair, and desperate need for food for the children so they can focus on learning while they are there. Victor has chosen to volunteer as the community organizer to improve the condition of 10 CBCCs. Thank you to the folks who donated school supplies to our team, we have delivered the first batch to the Senior Chief in the region to distribute as he is able. We hope this is just the beginning of a service project to make meaningful change led by a great Malawian. Thank you to all of Ntchentche for hosting us. We played soccer (not as well as you, of course!), danced together, and fell in love with your warm hearted community.

Day 3: Today we have departed Lilongwe and are on our way to Blantyre in the south of Malawi. We stopped off at Dedza Pottery for a great lunch and a little bit of happy shopping. We enjoyed a quick photo op in Mozambique, as the road south runs exactly on the border of these two beautiful countries.

05/24/2025

Thank you to the U.S. Embassy Lilongwe for hosting us!

05/22/2025

Day 1: TEAM Malawi is in the capitol city of Lilongwe. We started with a visit to the Kamuzu Mausoleum and learned about the four pillars set by the first president of Malawi: Unity, Loyalty, Obedience, and Discipline. We were honored to meet with the Chargé d'Affaires for Malawi’s US Embassy, Amy W. Diaz, and many of her directors across security, education, health, communications, and aid to discuss our ongoing projects and how we might best achieve our goals. The day finished at the Kamuzu Central Hospital with a tour of the grounds and select facilities, thank you to the Director, Deputy Director, and Biomedical Engineering Team for receiving us today to learn about your growing hospital campus.

05/21/2025

Touchdown TEAM Malawi! Takulandilani ku Malawi! 🇲🇼✈️