From the 29th of April to the 3rd of May 2025, the Center for Resilient Agri-food Systems (CRAFS), HISP UNIMA, and the Department of Climate Change and Meteorological Services (DCCMS) held a joint working session to kick-start the development of a Climate Data Web Portal for Malawi. 

The meeting brought together the Deputy Director of DCCMS, Amos D. Mtonya, and the Academic Head of CRAFS, who is also the Lead for HISP UNIMA, Dr. Tiwonge Manda, and technical teams to assess available data and establish clear development goals. Work centered on organizing historical climate data from 1981 to 2025 and preparing future climate scenarios up to 2100 for analysis and visualization. Key parameters to be provided via the portal include precipitation, temperature, water flow, wind, and dry spells with an emphasis on reliable aggregation and hydrogeological relevance. The platform will allow users to:

• Select scenarios, periods (monthly, annual, decadal), and regions or districts.

• Access explanations and summaries alongside the graphs.

• Download datasets directly from the platform.

The key outputs of the meeting were an alpha version of the portal and a shared work plan to focus on sector-specific data needs and visualization at national, district, and zone levels, standardized data aggregation methods using shapefiles, points, and enumeration areas. The plan also involves providing annual, monthly, and daily datasets for the periods and developing future climate scenario-based outputs by district and region.

The team was split into groups to handle different parts of the project, such as data preparation and analytics, project setup, back-end, and front-end development. By the end of the week, most things like interface design and data processing were done.

This was a productive week and a big step forward in making climate data more accessible and useful for decision-making in Malawi.