Factors Influencing the Awareness and Adoption of Borehole-Garden Permaculture in Malawi: Lessons for the Promotion of Sustainable Practices

Using wastewater accumulating around rural waterpoints to irrigate community gardens, borehole-garden permaculture presents a method of local sustainable water management. Alongside this, borehole-garden permaculture also presents public health benefits through the removal of stagnant water around boreholes, key Malaria breeding grounds, and through providing year-round food to supplement diets. By analysing a dataset of over 100,000 cases, this research examines the awareness and adoption of borehole-garden permaculture across Malawi. Generalised linear models identified significant variables influencing borehole-garden permaculture awareness and uptake revealing that socioeconomic, biophysical, and waterpoint-specific variables influenced both the awareness and adoption of borehole-garden permaculture. While 43.0% of communities were aware of borehole-garden permaculture uptake in Malawi was low; only 2.4% of communities surveyed were practising borehole-garden permaculture. Communities in areas with unreliable rainfall and high malaria susceptibility had low borehole-garden permaculture awareness despite borehole-garden permaculture being particularly beneficial to these communities. This work suggests that future work in the promotion of borehole-garden permaculture should focus their efforts within these areas. Furthermore, this work highlights the value of community networks in knowledge sharing and suggests that such social capital could be further used by NGOs and the Government of Malawi in the promotion of borehole-garden permaculture and other sustainable practices in water management.