Flora Kumilai squats before a heap of smoked catfish at Sorjin Market in southern Malawi, haggling with sellers over price as she fills cardboard boxes destined for a market 1,500 kilometers away on the border between Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. "I found gold in fish," she chuckles. "And Elephant Marsh is the mine."
Kumilai's journey — collecting nearly 900 kilograms of smoked fish from Elephant Marsh's seven markets, trucking it 140 kilometers north to Blantyre, then continuing across borders to sell in dollars — illustrates the economic pulse of one of Malawi's most vital wetlands. What makes this landscape remarkable is not just the trade that flows through it, but the thousands of lives it sustains and the fragile balance communities must now strike to keep it alive.
Elephant Marsh stretches across nearly 62,000 hectares in the floodplains of the lower Shire River, Malawi's largest. The wetland was declared a Ramsar Site in 2017 and harbors a rich ecosystem of swamp vegetation, hippos, reptiles, amphibians, and fish species found nowhere else in the country, including the Malawi sanjika and the African mottled eel. But its human value is equally profound. The marsh's fishery produces 2,100 metric tons annually, caught by around 4,500 fishers, making it the third most important fishery in the nation after Lake Malawi and Lake Chilwa. Beyond those directly casting nets, thousands more depend on the marsh — women who smoke and dry the catch, traders who ferry goods to markets, processors who prepare fish for sale, and families whose survival hinges on its bounty.
Mavuto Labu, vice chair of the Elephant Marsh Association, an umbrella body of community groups managing the wetland, emphasizes that fishing is the keystone. "It employs thousands as fishers and thousands more in fishing-related activities from the landing sites all the way to our local markets where the major item of trade is fish," he says. The work divides along gender lines: men dominate the actual fishing, mostly setting gill nets, while women control everything else — smoking or drying the catch, transporting it to markets, and buying and selling equipment.
Emma Dzangaya emerges from her kitchen, eyes red and tearing from smoke, where catfish sizzle on wire mesh above smoldering wood in a traditional kiln. At 42, she has processed fish her entire adult life, learning the trade from her father. She and her younger brother earn between $200 and $500 monthly from this work — a livelihood that depends entirely on the marsh's health. Yet that health is deteriorating. The wetland faces mounting pressures from expanding settlements, agricultural development, and deforestation that is visibly shrinking the landscape that sustains so many.
Recognizing this crisis, Malawi's government has empowered community groups like the Elephant Marsh Association to take responsibility for conserving the wetland. This approach places stewardship directly in the hands of those whose livelihoods depend on it — traders like Kumilai, smokers like Dzangaya, fishers, and their families. The logic is clear: communities will protect what they understand they cannot live without. Whether these grassroots efforts can outpace the pressures threatening to drain the marsh remains one of Malawi's most pressing conservation questions.