Changelog

Shows smallholder coffee gardens on the highland slopes, with the Viphya Plateau's pine ridges beyond.

Mzuzu's piped water runs short of demand and on no fixed schedule, and the higher and outer areas lose their taps first. The new board lets you tap your area when your water is out and see whether neighbours are reporting the same — so you can tell a town-wide cut from a problem with your own tank. It shows the NRWB fault line (374, toll-free from TNM numbers) alongside, and clears reports after a few hours so it always shows what's happening now.

Mzuzu gets one rainy season, and it decides both the harvest and which wards flood. This new tool tracks the last 30 days of rain against the 30-year average and the week ahead, with plain notes on what the rain means here — the low-lying wards that flood, the single maize crop, and why a wet year still doesn't fill the taps.

When the power goes, the first question is whether it's just your house or the whole area. This new board lets neighbours answer it for each other: tap the area you're in to report a cut, and see where else people are reporting one right now. It's filled in by residents, not ESCOM, so it sits alongside ESCOM's fault line (3030), not instead of it — and each report clears itself after a few hours, so the board empties when the power comes back.

Power faults and outages in Mzuzu and the north can now be reported on ESCOM's toll-free line 3030 — free from Airtel and TNM lines. It is listed under Who to call and in the power-cuts answer in Common questions. ESCOM's website was unreachable when we checked, but the toll-free line still works.

The board went live yesterday, but the code that loads its data never reached the site, so the page showed a placeholder instead of prices for about a day. That is fixed: it now shows the World Food Programme's latest monthly survey for all eleven markets, and how prices have usually moved through the year.

Malawi's fastest-growing city joins with three tools: live crop and input prices across Zigwagwa and ten northern trading centres (from the World Food Programme's monthly market survey, with a chart of how prices usually move through the year), straight answers to common questions about water, power, floods and the markets, and verified numbers for who to call. If you know which days your trading centre holds its market, the crop prices page explains how to tell us.