RESPONSIBLE TRAVEL | MALAWI | FISHERMAN’S REST
By the Fisherman’s Rest Team
Malawi is called the Warm Heart of Africa for a reason. If you stay at Fisherman’s Rest, you’ll travel with purpose and discover something the travel guides don’t quite capture…the warmth here isn’t just in the welcome. It’s in the people. The staff team, the work, the community, and the extraordinary things happening right on your doorstep.
Are you ready to experience it?!
Guests arrive at Fisherman’s Rest for projects. Yes, the sunsets are beautiful and the stillness of the evening air is punctured by cicadas, it’s Africa.
But nothing parallels the privilege of walking into another person’s home, being welcomed with open arms and learning about a different culture and people.
Between the morning coffee and the evening fire, you are out walking the same earth as the communities living around you. You hear about the handpumps being repaired in the villages, then you go out and experience it. You meet Shereen, who manages Tilitonse Community Centre and sits on the board of trustees of the local secondary school, then you spend an afternoon at Tilitonse community centre, meet ladies like Anne and the 80+ children and young people who access the centre every day, and realise why her job is so important. You meet Martin, a recent school graduate now building a future as a youth worker apprentice and it hits you how important a small move like offering an apprenticeship can change opportunities in rural village life.
Your trip becomes something more than you even thought it could be. Being intentional and purposeful about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it!
Fisherman’s Rest was built on the belief that tourism and community development can belong together, in a mutually beneficial relationship. Guests don’t come here to observe from a distance or join a “tour”. They come to participate in and contribute towards a place that is measurably, genuinely changing rural communities in one of the poorest countries in the world.
And we promise you, there’s smiles and goosebumps all round.
It’s a special place.
The Fisherman’s Rest Community Projects 2025 Trustees Annual Report has just been published. It tells a story worth reading whether you’ve visited once, supported for years, or are only just discovering us.
Over 2,400 handpumps across Blantyre Rural are being monitored and maintained, keeping functionality at 92% — one of the highest rates in Malawi. Nearly 630 young people across 12 schools have taken part in Project BRAVE, learning about respect, relationships, and dignity. 44,317 seedlings have been planted across 37 communities.
At Tilitonse Community Centre, over 100 children are receiving daily porridge at a time when Malawi’s cost of living is rising fast. Adults are learning to read and write. Students from Horton Secondary School are coming up the hill to practise their English and We are supporting IT and sports education at the school itself.
And so much more!
Or if you’re short on time, head to our projects website and…
One of the most worthwhile things a guest can do during a stay at Fisherman’s Rest is spend a week with the projects team.
Or extend your travel and long-term volunteer, spend a month or three with us!
Walk down to Tilitonse and you’ll find children deep in puzzles and crafts, adults working through literacy books, and a kitchen stove sending the smell of porridge across the yard. It doesn’t feel like a visit to a charity project, more like a community getting on with life — and welcoming you into it.
Visit a handpump repair in the field and you’ll meet the Madzi Alipo team engineers, community members, and local self-made mechanics who have all been a part in the most effective handpump management programme in Malawi. Watch them work and you’ll understand immediately why 96% of handpumps in the TA Somba area are currently functional (and continue to be). This is expertise, precision, and pride in equal measure.
Join the conservation team and you’ll sit alongside farmers nurturing tree nurseries, learning about soil health, and building something that will outlast all of us, and while growing trees for future generations, they also benefit from nature’s bounty.
Fisherman’s Rest welcomes long term volunteers who arrive with something specific to offer — a skill, a profession, a genuine curiosity — and who are ready to learn as much as they contribute.
Over the years, volunteers have supported IT training, conservation workshops, school mentoring, and project administration.
Student teachers have been accommodated at the lodge’s Tea House. Interns have worked alongside the Madzi Alipo water team.
We KNOW the best volunteering experiences aren’t about arriving with all the answers.
They’re about arriving with open hands and genuine respect for what the community has already built. Malawi has extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. The opportunity is to stand alongside that, work with us and to go home purpose-filled with a new Malawi-perspective on life.
If you’re interested in volunteering for 1 or more months: email us
If your visit to this page has sparked something, a desire to understand more, to stay connected with us, to find a way to keep being part of what’s happening in Malawi — the 2025 Trustees Annual Report is where to start.
It covers every programme in detail. Madzi Alipo. The schools. Conservation efforts. The Safe House. The Good Food Project. It’s honest, detailed, and we hope, full of the kind of information that turns a visitor into a long term, curious, friend…
And one day, a guest.
That’s the thing about Fisherman’s Rest. You don’t arrive and feel the weight of obligation. The countryside is stunning, the food is earthy, natural and delicious, and the sunsets are everything you hoped for.
And then the rest of it finds you. The children’s laughter from the community centre. The sound of a handpump working in a village that went without clean water for months. A hillside that was bare a few years ago, now thick with seedlings reaching for the sky.
You’ll leave with Malawi in your bones.
Interested in visiting, volunteering, or finding out more about Fisherman’s Rest Community Projects? Get in touch — we’d love to hear from you.
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