Tears stream down Francine’s* face as she pulls her glove off. Her right hand is covered by a pale, mottled burn scar. Her fingers are stiff and unnaturally bent. Francine turned to sex work to survive soon after she arrived alone at Malawi’s Dzaleka refugee camp in 2015, having travelled there from Burundi.
On Christmas Eve in 2022, a client refused to pay. When she blocked the doorway, he grabbed a boiling-hot saucepan of beans and threw it at her, scalding her hand and chest.
Life for refugees in Malawi has become much more difficult, with funding cuts by international donors resulting in most eating just once a day. At the same time, the chances of relocation to countries in the west have been reduced from small to remote after the US stopped accepting refugees (apart from white South Africans that US officials falsely claimed were facing “white genocide”.
Since 2021, the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, has proposed almost 9,000 people as candidates for resettlement. Of those, 3,703 left Malawi, 80% of them to the US. This year, just 450 refugees are expected to relocate – to Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
After being abandoned by her mother, Francine lived in Burundi with an uncle involved in politics, who was gunned down in 2014. She injured herself escaping through a window, and still shakes and twitches as she recalls the gunshots.
Haunted by her trauma, the 29-year-old mother of children aged two and nine believes her life would be at risk if she returned to Burundi and wonders why she has never been considered for relocation.
“Sometimes I see other people going, who are in good health, but … I am staying behind. I feel so much pain,” Francine says through an interpreter, a fellow refugee. “Sometimes I ask myself, ‘Why is it that I don’t get helped like others? Is it because of who I am, my health condition?’”
Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries, has a long history of hosting refugees, accepting more than 1 million from neighbouring Mozambique during its civil war from 1977 to 1992, most of whom then returned home.
Dzaleka camp was built on the outskirts of the capital, Lilongwe, in 1994 to accommodate Rwandans fleeing the genocide. The densely populated camp, which has become an urban slum, was designed to host 10,000 people.
Now, more than 58,000 refugees live there, says the camp manager, Gerald Chiganda. About 60% of them are from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), from where up to 200 more arrive monthly.
“If the trend continues like this, it means we won’t be able to sustain [the camp],” he says.
Malawi’s “encampment policy” prevents refugees from legally living or working outside Dzaleka, making them especially vulnerable to funding cuts. Cash payments from the UN’s World Food Programme have been reduced to 50% of what is needed for food, about $8 (£6) for each person a month, says the WFP’s country head, Simon Denhere.
The WFP says it needs $8.7m to provide Dzaleka’s residents with enough money for their food needs until next March. Denhere says the funding issues are connected to wider global donor cuts, not just the Trump administration slashing US aid this year.
Last year, the US contributed 59% of the UNHCR’s $8m budget for Malawi. This year, that figure was 11% of $4.8m and the UNHCR, which has handed the camp school and hospital to Malawi’s government to run, is cutting its 44 staff to three.
The economic pressures have led to a rise in sex work, domestic violence cases and children stealing, says Anne*, a Rwandan refugee who in May lost her job working on cases of domestic violence due to the funding cuts.
Anne, a mother of seven, still volunteers and estimates that she sees four to six victims of domestic violence a week, double the number of two years ago. “The cases have been too high,” she says.
Malawi is planning to build a new camp near the Tanzanian border more than 400 miles (about 650km) north of Dzaleka, with farm land for refugees. However, Anne and other refugees say they want to stay in Dzaleka. “That is like starting a new life,” says Anne, who fled death threats in Rwanda 22 years ago.
The government is also considering changing the law to allow refugees to work outside camps. Kouame Cyr Modeste, the outgoing UNHCR representative, says he expects the change to happen by January, even if a new government comes in after elections on 16 September.
Judith* fled Lubumbashi in the southern DRC in 2016, after armed men killed her parents. Just 14, she was left looking after her three younger siblings, then aged eight, nine and 11. She had to turn to sex work and has a four-year-old child with an absent father.
Asked about her hopes for the future, Judith, who is pregnant again, sighs. “I don’t know,” she says. “We see other people travelling to a third country. But, all of the years that we have been here, UNHCR has never thought about us.”
* Names have been changed to protect their identity
