For Doreen Kengelemu, the problem with dairy farming was not producing milk.
It was getting the milk across a river before it spoiled.
The 54-year-old widow from Mombola Village outside Blantyre in southern Malawi had used money saved from growing pigeon peas and vegetables to buy into dairy farming. She hoped milk would provide a steadier source of income and help her become more financially independent.
For much of the year, the opportunity was there. Farmers in her area had a ready market through the Mpemba Milk Bulking Group.
Then the rains came.
Between December and March, the Matope River could swell until farmers living on the opposite bank could no longer reliably reach the bulking centre at Mpemba.
Cows, of course, did not stop producing milk because the river had become impassable.
“I took my money which I had saved from pigeon peas and vegetable farming and ventured into dairy farming hoping that the income from it will enable me to be self-reliant. While we have a ready market for our milk, but during rainy season we could not be able to take and reach the milk bulking centre at Mpemba due to lack of a bridge over Matope river.”
For a smallholder farmer, spoiled milk represents much more than a lost sale. Feed has already been bought. Cattle have been cared for. Labour, water and land have already been invested in producing something highly perishable.
If that milk cannot reach collection and cooling in time, those resources are lost with it.
When the Market Ends at the Riverbank
Kengelemu belongs to the Mpemba Milk Bulking Group, part of the Shire Highlands Milk Producers Association.
Milk bulking allows many small producers to pool their output before it is sold to processors. Instead of each household negotiating individually, milk can be collected, handled and marketed through a shared system.
But a cooperative market only works if farmers can physically reach it.
According to the farmers interviewed for this story, around 100 dairy farmers lived on the side of the Matope River that became difficult or impossible to cross during periods of heavy rain. They estimated that the disruption contributed to losses of around 20,000 litres of milk per month for approximately three months of the rainy season.
Evelesi Kaliati experienced the same frustration.
“It was frustrating to be a dairy farmer here,” says the mother of four.
Adija Matemba had joined the milk group during 2024. She says the lack of visible returns made it difficult to persuade her husband that keeping their two dairy cattle remained worthwhile.
“The impassability of the Matope river in the rainy season sabotaged our efforts to earn income all year round,” she says.
This is one of the less visible ways infrastructure shapes a food system.
A farmer may have livestock, knowledge and a willing buyer, yet one missing connection between farm and market can undermine the value of everything happening on either side of it.
The Bridge Changed the Economics of Dairy Farming
That missing connection has now been built.
The Matope Bridge was constructed through Malawi’s Transforming Agriculture through Diversification and Entrepreneurship Programme, or TRADE, implemented through the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development with financing that includes support from the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
TRADE is designed to help smallholder farmers increase production, participate more effectively in commercial value chains and overcome constraints that prevent agricultural products from reaching markets.
The programme’s own reporting identifies the Matope Bridge and Mpemba Milk Bulking Centre as infrastructure serving dairy farmers in the area.
For Kengelemu, the practical result is straightforward: the route to the milk buyer no longer disappears whenever the river rises.
Kengelemu has shelved her plan to sell her cattle. Instead, she hopes to add another animal and increase production.
She reports producing around 20 litres of milk a day and earning approximately MK120,000 per month from milk sales.
For Matemba, dairy income has also become more dependable, and she is focusing on better feed and animal health in the hope of increasing production.
The bridge did not create their farming skills or their market.
It removed the barrier sitting between them.
Stopping Food Loss Before It Happens
The sustainability case for the bridge is not that dairy farming suddenly becomes impact-free.
It does not.
Livestock production uses land, feed, water and energy and has its own environmental footprint. But once food has been produced, allowing it to spoil because basic transport and storage systems fail compounds the resources already invested in it.
The Food and Agriculture Organization has long noted that in lower-income countries, food losses occur disproportionately during production, storage, transport and processing rather than primarily in households.
Milk is particularly vulnerable because it needs timely handling and cooling. FAO identifies functioning cold chains as crucial for avoiding losses of highly perishable foods including milk. More recent FAO work estimates that inadequate refrigeration contributes to hundreds of millions of tonnes of food loss globally each year.
That makes transport infrastructure part of food-loss prevention.
A cold room cannot preserve milk that never reaches it.
This is the same broader problem explored in our guide to food waste and climate change: the environmental impact of discarded food includes the resources and emissions already embedded in growing, producing, storing and transporting it.
A Dairy Group Built Around Women
The Mpemba group is particularly significant because women make up the overwhelming majority of its members.
The reporter was told that the group currently comprises around 480 women and 20 men.
Its emphasis on women was deliberate. When the initiative was established, it sought to expand livelihood opportunities for women in vulnerable circumstances, including widows, divorced women, single mothers and older women.
Kengelemu’s own story demonstrates why that matters.
She did not invest in dairy simply because she wanted another farming activity. She used savings from crops because she hoped milk income would help make her more self-reliant.
When the river prevented her from reaching the market, it weakened the independence that investment was supposed to provide.
That connection between agriculture, market access and women’s economic security also appears elsewhere in Malawi’s food system. Our earlier reporting on economic opportunity and rural livelihoods in Malawi similarly found that access to roads, finance, markets and agricultural support can have especially important consequences for women farmers and rural households.
One Cow Can Create an Opportunity for Another Farmer
The structure of the dairy group is also unusual.
New participants do not necessarily need enough money to purchase a dairy cow outright.
Through a pass-on model, a farmer can receive a cow through the association and later transfer a female calf to another participant.
The beneficiary does not simply repay the original animal in cash. Reproduction allows the productive asset — and the opportunity attached to it — to move through the community.
Farmers can also access veterinary services and financial support, with some repayments gradually deducted from milk sales.
The model does not remove all of the risks associated with dairy farming. Animals require feed, veterinary care and ongoing labour. But it lowers one of the largest barriers to entry: obtaining the animal in the first place.
And when the transport system works, that cow can generate a recurring product that households can consume or sell.
Milk Is Paying for School Fees and Better Roofs
The Mpemba Milk Bulking Group currently reports collecting roughly 600 to 1,000 litres of milk a day and selling to several dairy companies.
The benefits described by members are remarkably concrete.
Milk income is being used for school fees. Some households are improving their homes and replacing leaking roofs with corrugated iron. Milk also contributes directly to household diets.
“The immediate results of our dairy farming and bulking are that we are now able to sell milk to four companies and the proceeds are helping us to pay schools fees for our dependents while for others like me, we are constructing and renovating our homes with corrugated iron roofs replacing the old and leaking ones,” she marvels.
Those outcomes explain why a bridge can matter far beyond transport.
When infrastructure connects small farmers to reliable buyers, income can travel back through the household into education, housing, food and future investment.
A Bridge Can Be Economic Infrastructure for Women
Infrastructure is often described through engineering specifications, construction costs and numbers of beneficiaries.
Those measures are important, but they can hide the social consequences of whether infrastructure exists at all.
For farmers across the Matope River, seasonal isolation had a particular impact because dairy was intended to provide women with greater economic independence.
Matemba describes tension within her own household when milk losses made dairy farming appear financially pointless and her husband suggested selling their cattle.
Reliable market access does not automatically eliminate gender inequality, and owning livestock does not guarantee empowerment.
But economic opportunity depends on being able to participate in an economy.
When a woman can produce milk but cannot physically reach the buyer for months at a time, the opportunity is only partly real.
Infrastructure Has to Work in the Rainy Season Too
The Matope story is also a reminder that rural infrastructure should be judged by whether it works when communities most need it.
Seasonal rainfall is part of Malawi’s agricultural calendar. A crossing that routinely becomes unusable during the wet months creates a predictable interruption in livelihoods.
IFAD’s earlier work in Malawi explicitly linked investments in roads, bridges and culverts with milk bulking centres and agricultural warehouses, describing infrastructure as a way to address constraints on farmers’ access to markets.
That principle remains simple: connecting farmers to buyers is not only about producing more food. It is also about ensuring the food already being produced can move.
The role of rural infrastructure becomes even more important where agriculture supports household food security and incomes. As our reporting on Malawian farmers adapting their livelihoods has shown, rural households frequently have to combine new farming practices, infrastructure and access to markets to remain resilient when conditions become difficult.
The Bridge Cannot Fix the Price of Milk
The gains are real, but the dairy farmers still face serious problems.
Mazoni Chilambula, a veterinary extension consultant working with the group, points to the high cost and limited availability of good animal feed, along with low milk prices and inefficiencies in the dairy market.
Animal health remains another constraint. Better access to buyers is valuable only when cattle are healthy enough to produce reliably and farmers can afford to maintain them.
This is an important corrective to a simple development success story.
A bridge can remove one bottleneck. It cannot guarantee a fair farmgate price, affordable feed or effective veterinary care.
The larger system still matters.
That is true of sustainable agriculture more broadly. Smallholders need not only productive farms but access to services, infrastructure, finance and markets if farming is to support viable livelihoods. Our overview of small-scale farming and sustainable food systems looks at the wider role smaller producers can play when those supporting systems function.
Sometimes Development Is One Missing Connection
There is nothing futuristic about the Matope Bridge.
It is concrete crossing a river.
Yet before it existed, almost everything else needed for a functioning dairy value chain was already present.
The farmers were producing milk.
The milk bulking group existed.
The processors were willing to buy.
The households wanted the income.
For several months each year, what was missing was simply a reliable way to get from one side of the river to the other.
Now milk can cross when the river is high. Product that once risked spoiling has a better chance of reaching cooling and market. Women who considered abandoning dairy farming have reason to keep their cattle. Income can flow into school fees, feed, housing and household needs.
The bridge itself does not produce milk, educate children or create women’s independence.
It makes more of those things possible.