Field note · August 12, 2026
What happened
Maize in the Zomba and Machinga districts rose roughly 34% between March and May, well beyond what the quarterly grant had been costed against. Nineteen school kitchens served reduced portions for two weeks and then stopped hot meals entirely for six.
What we did
We released contingency reserves in the third week and meals resumed, but six weeks is six weeks and about 141,000 plates were not served. We are not going to round that off. The children affected got take-home rations for the period, which is a worse substitute than it sounds because it doesn't reach the kids whose households were already stretched.
What changed
Three things. We now hold three months of food costs in reserve rather than one. We buy the bulk of the year's grain within six weeks of harvest and pay for storage, which costs about 4% but hedges out most of the swing. And quarterly grants to price-volatile districts are now indexed to a local price basket rather than fixed in dollars.