There has been exceptionally little coverage of it, but there is currently ongoing flooding in Malawi. A couple of my Facebook friends run a charity that works there, and they have posted links to what reports there are, and as I wanted to look further into this I have come up against a bit of a wall.

I might be wrong, but this type of flooding appears to be a common occurrence as the rains return, but the effects are no less devastating to those affected. Some news reports claim that houses have been seen to have been washed away.

I see Malawi as a potential site for my research. It has a similar climate to the region of the Senegal River Basin I studied for my PhD, and similarly it also has a paucity of ground instruments to observe rainfall. It’s river catchments are degrading, in the sense that soil and sediments are being washed away by floods and rivers, and there seems to be active research, with field measurements, here.

I want to combine the different strands of my research, and I feel more and more drawn to Malawi as a place to do this.