Our vision as OM Malawi is to see people and entire communities being transformed through the preaching of the gospel and the equipping of true believers for ministry and service. By equipping Christians, we hope to mobilise the local church to reach out to the millions of Yao Muslims living in Malawi.

Malawi is one of Africa’s landlocked countries, perhaps best known for beautiful Lake Malawi and the country’s friendly, open-hearted people.

Thousands of people ‘disappeared’ during the 30-year dictatorship that ruled the country until 1994, and today 85% of the rural population lives in poverty, surviving on less than one US dollar a day. Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world.

OM didn’t have a presence in Malawi until 2005 when we took a research mission to the country. A few months later OM Malawi was founded and today we are based in Ntaja, south of Lake Malawi. Our ministry focus is to the Yao Muslims; The Yao are an ethnic group numbering about two million people.

The Yao people have long embraced Islam as their religion since it was first introduced to them by Arabs during the slave trade in the early 1800s. Nowadays, to be Yao is to be Muslim. Malawi boasts the highest percentage of Muslims in southern Arica, and less than 1% of the Yao population claims to be Christian.