Welcome to ELDS Weblog

Introduction

The republic of Malawi is located in the southern African Region of the continent covering an area of 45,745square Km. the country has a number of rivers and lakes the biggest being lake Malawi.
During civil war in Mozambique, Malawi offered refugees a safe haven. A cease-fire was reached in 1992. From the 1980’s Malawi hosted 1.3 million people up to when they were repatriated in 1996.
Approximately half of them were housed in refugee camps; the other half lived in the villages and integrated with the local population. In 1989, the Lutheran world federation (LWF based in Geneva) was invited to come to Malawi to primarily provide relief assistance to the Mozambican refugees.
The Evangelical Lutheran Development service (ELDS) a service arm of the Evangelical lutheran Church in Malawi formerly evangelical Lutheran development programme (ELDP) was established in 1989 to provide relief assistance to the Mozambican refugees hosted by some Malawian communities then
In the course of assisting the refugees, it was realized that the Malawians who were hosting the refugees were as deserving of assistance as the refugees.
After the repatriation of the refugees, ELDP started working with Malawian communities.
The organization works with six districts namely Karonga, Nkhatabay, Dowa, Dedza, Phalombe and Chikwawa with an addition of two districts in the central region namely Kasungu and Lilongwe. The projects that are implemented under this development service are food security, environmental protection, water and sanitation, HIV/AIDS, Gender, human rights and advocacy, adult literacy, micro finance and emergency and rehabilitation.
ELDS has along time experience in implementing projects under these sectors and is mandated by its strategic plan to continue implementing projects covered within these sectors under approaches that ensure sustainability of the projects.