Being a relatively small and landlocked country, the road infrastructure plays an important role for both the domestic and international transport of commodities in Malawi. During the early 2000’s Malawi was devoting nearly 4% of its GDP to road sector spending. Out of the 25,000 km road network 4000 are paved.  75 % of these paved roads are main roads.  Equally important is the identification of feeder roads, Malawi has 79,000 km of feeder roads connecting rural areas (such as farms and small villages) to local markets. The road quality in Malawi is good when analysing both paved and unpaved roads. Physical challenges for the road sector are mainly preservation related. Over 98% of road carriers based in Malawi have ten (10) or less vehicles thereby being classified as small or medium scale transporters and the remaining 2% can be classified as large-scale transporters. The humanitarian sector works with all types of transporters. Malawi has many transporters that deal in cross border trucking business but for large scale humanitarian operations, external transporters are also used to beef up capacity and use their economies of scale in terms of costs.

For more details about Malawi transporters, refer to 4.8 Malawi Transporter Contact List.

Transporters on the WFP roster are categorised based on their capacity and type of trucks as per table below.