[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?