Abstract

The population of older people in Malawi is rising and this is beneficial to the country. However, the physiologic realities of older age, such as the age-associated declines in physiologic reserves, reduced functioning and increased susceptibility to multiple illnesses coupled with vulnerability to various forms of abuse, mean that older people constitute a special population group requiring special attention. Despite various national attempts to uplift their welfare over the years, elders in Malawi continue to live in poor conditions. The lack of capacity to graduate into nationally-supported long-term programmes has been the hallmark of community and grassroots level elderly projects. This is because of various factors, among them scarcity of information on the situation of older people in Malawi. In this chapter, we present a part of the results of our project on evaluation of older Malawians’ functional capacity, quality of life and physical activity levels. By doing this, we intend to stimulate academic discussion on the topic and make available some preliminary information on epidemiologic, anthropometric and physiologic characteristics of older people in Malawi for use in intervention planning, economic evaluation and research studies.