Dedza - People

Dedza is a local government administrative district in the centre of Malawi. In area it is about the same size as Norfolk - 40 miles north to south and 70 miles east to west. The total population is approximately 0.5 million.

Dedza village

The 222 main town, Dedza Township, (pop 20,000) is 50 miles south of the Malawi capital, Lilongwe, on the main road to the second city of Blantyre. It is at a point on the Mozambique border where a trans-African highway from Johannesburg enters the country. The town has a bank, post office, supermarket, filling stations, market, numerous small shops and some bars and restaurants.

There are other small market towns, each with post office, shops and workshops distributed around the district - Lobi, Linthipe, Mayana, Mtakataka. However, 90% of the people live in small villages of thatched houses. They are subsistence farmers, often working less than one hectare of land. The villages are connected to the highway by dirt roads. There is unlikely to be an electricity supply. Most villages will have a borehole pump for clean water and there may be a primary school shared by a number of villages.