THRIVE: working with communities to build resilience to climate change in Malawi
- Video
1 October 2026
How do extreme weather events affect food, nutrition and mental health in rural communities, and how can communities help shape more resilient responses?
The THRIVE programme is exploring these questions with farming and fishing communities in Malawi. The research looks at how climate shocks affect nutrition and mental health, how these impacts are connected, and why different groups may experience them differently.
Communities are involved throughout the research, helping to identify existing resilience strategies and develop and test new approaches to reducing the effects of extreme weather on health and wellbeing.
By combining research evidence with local knowledge and experience, THRIVE aims to strengthen community resilience and help inform policy in Malawi.
Watch the video to find out more about THRIVE and the role communities will play in the research.
[00:00:00] The THRIVE programme, uh, is focused on climate change in Malawi. It’s particularly looking at the effects of extreme weather events to food, nutrition, and mental health in farming and fishing communities that are rural. And it’s looking at how extreme weather events actually negatively affect nutrition and mental health and how that is interlinked.
And then what we are going to do with that information, we are going to do a community-based, uh, action research where communities, um, different people like, um, across generations, people from different groups are to… coming together to see, uh, how they can, uh, improve their resilience to this, uh, climate shocks.
So local communities are involved in the THRIVE research from the beginning up till the end. We are going to work with, uh, eight [00:01:00] community ethnographers. So they are just basically citizen ethnographers. They are actually people from the very communities that we are studying. Uh, they are getting trained.
They are part of the research team, and they are going to, uh, conduct, uh, community mappings and particip- uh, participant observations, really, you know, observing what is happening in the community, which groups are most effective, what are the resilience strategies that are already currently employed, and what can we learn about that.
They will also work together with professional researchers in conducting, uh, participatory, um, mapping exercises, um, creating causal loop diagrams on the effects of extreme weather events to nutrition and mental health and all the interlinkages. They will also, uh, be part of focus group discussions and interviews.
Then later on, when we know more about these interrelated [00:02:00] effects, they are going to be part of participatory action research cycles, where groups of community members are together going through two action research cycles, where they, um, develop, uh, implement, and evaluate their own resilience strategies.
And those strategies are aiming to basically reduce the negative effects of extreme weather events to nutrition and mental health in, in their communities. So what inspired this research is basically the current situation in Malawi. Uh, we see, uh, that extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and intensity, and this has, uh, uh, negative effects on, uh, food, nutrition, and mental health.
There is some anecdotic information about that evidence, um, [00:03:00] but we don’t know enough. We don’t know really what type of contextual factors are influencing this, uh, how it turns out differently for different groups in the community. So we would like to have more evidence around that. We discussed our proposal with different stakeholders in Malawi, including different NGOs as well as the Ministry of Health, and they told us they are particularly interested in how climate change is affecting mental health because that is currently a research and evidence gap.
Um, they also wanted to know more about what are communities at this moment already doing themselves to basically, um, adapt to climate change because the communities are continuously responding to this type of events already on their own. And how can we bring those learnings into [00:04:00] national and subnational policy, and how can we also improve, uh, this resilience at community level?