Malawi, one of Africa's poorest nations, has made significant progress in improving the survival of newborns and is on track to meet the United Nations Millennium Development Goal number four - to reduce the deaths of children up to the age of five by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015. This is according to a new report released by Save the Children, which identifies how newborn infants have been overlooked by global efforts intent on improving child and maternal health. While newborns make up 40 percent of child deaths annually, they receive just six percent of development aid. According to the report, Malawi has the highest rate of pre-term births in the world (18 per cent). Roughly a third of all newborn deaths are due to complications that arise from such births.

Malawi's new president, Joyce Banda, has inherited an unenviable to-do list from former president Bingu wa Mutharika, and AIDS activists are hoping that bolstering the donor-dependent AIDS response will be one of her most urgent priorities. A lot is at stake. An estimated 10 per cent of the adult population is HIV-positive, with about 70,000 Malawians newly infected with HIV every year. Yet the country is almost entirely dependent on external funding for its AIDS programmes, and ambitious plans to scale up treatment have been derailed after the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria rejected a succession of funding proposals.

Malawi’s Farm Input Subsidy program, touted for improving food security for the past six years, has been allocated a whopping K40.6 billion in the 2012/13 budget which represents about 60 per cent of the Ministry of Agriculture allocation. 'The major allocation is for the Farm Inputs Subsidy Program (FISP) which has been allocated a total of K40.6 billion for the purchase of 150,000 metric tonnes of fertilizers comprising 75,000 metric tonnes of Urea and 75,000 metric tonnes of NPK fertilizers which will be distributed to 1.5 million farm families at a price of K500 per bag,' said Lipenga when he presented the financial plan.