[xandrius]

I think just you can get a glimpse by what they export (from Wikipedia):

- Malawi: tobacco (55%), dried legumes (8.8%), sugar (6.7%), tea (5.7%), cotton (2%), peanuts, coffee, soy (2015 est.)

- Rwanda: Gold, tin ores, coffee, malt extract, rare earth ores

I can easily see why one has a higher GDP than the other. Very little mistery to me.

[nearbuy]

As the article states, that Malawi hasn't developed much industry or exports is more of a description of poverty than an explanation. Malawi can grow coffee, but mostly doesn't. They have rare earth element deposits, but little mining. Why haven't they developed more?

[autoexec]

> They have rare earth element deposits, but little mining.

When it comes to mining it looks like china has been screwing them over https://adf-magazine.com/2026/02/chinese-mines-openly-break-...

[red-iron-pine]

"belt and road" in action

[asdff]

When you consider places that do have significant mining, it isn't like that investment is exclusively home grown. Often what happens is it comes from external capital seeking permissive governments willing to give claims to these natural resources to these external companies to make a profit off of.

The fact that there is little mining of the natural resources in Malawi paints a picture of a government that might be less influenced by foreign money than others in the global south, moreso than any statement on poverty.

[nearbuy]

Are you suggesting that the lack of development and poverty is caused by good government?

[elmomle]

Could it be that they haven't been so infected by the money bug that for now they still have a society oriented around happiness and maintaining traditional ways of life rather than economic attainment?

[jonathanlydall]

I live in South Africa and my gardener happens to be Malawian, as was a gardener my parents had when I was growing up.

They’re both good people with pride in their work, but they are from poverty and have little in the way of skills except for manual labour jobs.

They came to South Africa, like so many from nearby countries, as our significantly more developed economy offers far better earning opportunity.

Not relevant to your comment, but want to also mention this creates xenophobic tension with the section of the local population which is in poverty as they feel their jobs are stolen. While there are certainly cases where people illegally employ immigrants to pay them less than locals, in cases where pay is at least equal, Zimbabweans and Malawians tend to have reputation of being more honest and hard working than the indigenous population.

We have Nigerians come here too and by contrast they tend to be super scetchy.

[doodlebugging]

I don't know why Malawi is poor but I was struck by how easily this comment can be paraphrased to describe somewhere thousands of miles distant.

*********

I live in North Texas and my gardener happens to be Mexican, as was a gardener my parents had when I was growing up.

They’re both good people with pride in their work, but they are from poverty and have little in the way of skills except for manual labor jobs.

They came to North Texas, like so many from nearby countries, as our significantly more developed economy offers far better earning opportunity.

Not relevant to your comment, but want to also mention this creates xenophobic tension with the section of the local population which is in poverty as they feel their jobs are stolen. While there are certainly cases where people illegally employ immigrants to pay them less than locals, in cases where pay is at least equal, Hondurans and Mexicans tend to have reputation of being more honest and hard working than the indigenous population.

We have Floridians come here too and by contrast they tend to be super sketchy.

********

I read your original comment and was struck by how well it fits the situation here in Texas. You could've made the same comment about South Africa 40 years ago and it would still translate to the situation in Texas.

I don't know how you feel about people coming to South Africa for a shot at a better life but have to say that I have the highest respect for those men and women who have left their homes and families across the border for an uncertain future here in the US despite knowing that it is quite true that in many jobs they will be paid less than locals who do less actual work. All of this while being gamed by employers who know that they are illegally in the country and who work closely with Immigration Officials to identify people who can be quickly rounded up and sent south to pad some politician's resume or to distract the public from some other more significant issue. The employers never suffer consequences though they are the ones who created the opportunity and actively assisted in concealing immigration status for many of the workers.

It is a complex issue that should be solvable but as long as there are powerless people to heap the blame on we will probably see this continue.

[jonathanlydall]

Yes, I was thinking as I wrote it that there are likely parallels to places in US.

And yes, it’s a complex issue for sure.

I’m convinced that the way out of poverty here is through education and sadly there is just a huge amount of apathy (when not corruption) at all levels here by the people who are supposed to be making it happen, from pupils, their parents, teachers, etc, all the way to the minister of education.

Meanwhile people like me pay huge amounts of tax and still need to pay for private schooling for my kids, private security and medical aid.

Essentially, most of the money I pay for tax is a charity intended for the poor, but due to apathy/incompetence/corruption, not nearly enough of it gets used effectively.

[doodlebugging]

Parallels.

The wrong people capturing the resources that were earmarked for useful purposes and using them to enrich themselves.

[aaronbrethorst]

They're fourth from the bottom on the happiness index. https://mwnation.com/malawi-named-the-4th-least-happiest-cou...

[abigail95]

Would you want to live there?

[cylemons]

As a non Malawian no, but I do think its important to ask what the local sentiment of their country is.

[dash2]

If you are very poor, material income is very important to your well-being. About one Malawian infant in thirty dies during infancy. This is not “the good life”.

[alephnerd]

Also, foreign aid. Rwanda received massive amounts of foreign aid unlike Malawi [0] and de facto colonized the DRC's mine fields [1]

[0] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.ODA.ODAT.GN.ZS?locat...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/rwanda-exercises-comman...

[londons_explore]

Foreign aid is rarely a gift - in almost all cases it is a business transaction. It is given as a loan, or in return for some mineral rights, or for an important UN vote, or for allegiance in a war.

For the loan cases, the terms are often unaffordable, effectively handing effective control of the entire country to the entity who has the other end of the loan - it is the modern empire-by-debt.

[edbaskerville]

The Rwanda case cannot be told without Paul Kagame, one of the rare authoritarians who is also a real nation-builder, analogous to Park Chung Hee (South Korea, 1960s-1970s). He locks up his opponents but also has leveraged aid to really help socioeconomic conditions. E.g., the very close and productive collaboration with Partners in Health/Paul Farmer.

[alephnerd]

Kagame cannot be compared to Park Chung Hee or LKY. Park's economic policies actually helped South Korea climb up the economic value chain, though a lot of that was also due to Japanese technology transfers to Korea in the 1960s-90s.

On the other hand, Kagame's execution on economic reform has been a failure when compared against Uganda, as Uganda [0] has a significantly more complex (ie. higher value) economy than Rwanda [1] despite also suffering a severe civil war in the 1990s and dealing with the Idi Amin's kleptocratic rule in the 1980s.

[0] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/800/export-basket

[1] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/646/export-basket

[edbaskerville]

Thanks, that's interesting.

& that is a great website...

[sofixa]

No.

A lot of foreign aid is direct things like food, medicine, doctors, AIDS prevention programmes, vaccines for specific things, maternal care, containment of an Ebola epidemic, etc.

Do you really think that e.g. Kenya is voting alongside EU members because the EU paid for a part of a highway between two cities in Kenya?

Then yes, there are loans and grants for infrastructure things.

> For the loan cases, the terms are often unaffordable, effectively handing effective control of the entire country to the entity who has the other end of the loan - it is the modern empire-by-debt.

That's not true. The rates are very public, and while sometimes they are on the higher end, unaffordable is a stretch, and that's how loan rates work. It is inherently risky to give loans to a developing country with high corruption rates. That's why there are also lots of direct grants or direct physical aid with stuff instead of money.

The IMF also sometimes gives loans with strict requirements on market reforms, which can be controversial. Notably in the former Soviet/Warsaw pact bloc, economic shock therapy under instruction of the IMF had some devastating short term consequences, and in some countries led to mass dubious privtisations. In most though, it paid off and led to rapid and sustained economic and social growth.

[alephnerd]

Sadly you got downvoted to oblivion but you are absolutely correct.

I'm honestly disheartened by how much HN has degraded into Reddit now.

[bigyabai]

C'mon now, you don't get to break the guidelines when the site disagrees with you: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

  Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

[sofixa]

There are a few things to note here.

For both, around half of GDP is in the services sector. It doesn't matter that much what raw resources they export when it's a smaller portion of GDP (23% in Rwanda, 15% in Malawi). Also, almost all of those raw resources that Rwanda exports are stolen from the DRC by Rwanda-backed militias.

Foreign aid, and Rwanda's ability to position itself geopolitically as a trusted stable partner (which enables more aid and for it to get away with theft and murder) have more impact than maize vs gold.

And in the end, there are plenty of countries that have successfully developed and become less or not poor without having anything of serious value to export. From Bangladesh to the Balkans (I mean post-decolonisation Balkans, not post-Iron Curtain - it was mostly an area with subsistence farming as the main employment, disease, low rates of literacy and very low for higher education, frequent conflict and ethnic/religious tensions, few natural resources other than grain and some very limited amounts coal/minerals). If anything, it usually is the opposite, cf. the resource curse.

[boelboel]

There's barely any mines in Rwanda btw. DRC is closer to the later in terms of exports and I wouldn't say it's doing better.

[ExpertAdvisor01]

Rwanda controls significant amount of mines in eastern drc(north kivu) through the m23 rebels.

[pseudohadamard]

I haven't been to Malawi but I've spent time in Lesotho which is in a fairly similar position: A nation made up mostly of peasant farmers barely surviving on small, not-very-productive plots that are heavily dependent on there being rain at the right time, a bit like a lot of central/eastern Europe 150+ years ago. There just isn't anything there to build on, you can't get taxes from someone with no money, you can't combine family-held plots into larger productive farms with the former landowners working as farm laborers - you could have a hundred years ago as an evil colonizer but not today - there's really no way out.

On the other hand while the people had nothing, they didn't seem terribly upset by it. Everyone just got on with their lives, there was (compared to the surrounding South Africa) very little to no crime or violence, it was a poor but not miserable country. Do you need to be well-off to be happy?

[exe34]

The agricultural exporters probably have a lot less heavy metal in their blood.