Changelog

Mzuzu already had a page for deciding whether to store maize or sell it now. This is the page that comes before it: how much of the harvest is your family going to eat? Put in what is actually in the store, how many people eat from it, and how much the household goes through — and it works out roughly how long that lasts, whether it reaches next June's harvest, and how many bags short you are if it does not. Nothing is sent anywhere; the numbers stay in the phone. The reason it exists is that grain sold in June and bought back in February is the most expensive trade a household can make, and it is easy to make by accident when nobody has counted. Knowing the spare part is what makes the store-or-sell question a real choice. Two things the page is deliberately careful about. It asks what your household actually eats before offering any published figure, because the published figures disagree by more than double — a national average counts city households eating rice and cassava, while a farming district's own planning figure assumes maize at nearly every meal. All three are shown, each with its source, and the spread is on the page rather than hidden behind one confident number. And it allows for what the store itself takes: weevils and the grain borer get a share, the share grows the longer it sits, and grain that came in at the last harvest is already well along that curve. It is arithmetic, not a forecast. Households eat more when relatives arrive, when there is a funeral, when someone is ill. Nobody should sell down to the line it draws.

Store your maize, or sell now? works through the numbers for your own harvest — what you'd get selling today against what the same maize might fetch in the lean season, minus what stored grain loses to weevils. It shows the break-even: how far the price has to rise before storing beats selling, and how much airtight bags help. Check today's price in the crop-prices tool. The seasonal pattern is the usual one, not a prediction — prices can fall in a good year.

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.