When the Malawi Women’s National Football Team-the Scorchers walked onto the pitch at the Moulay El Hassan Stadium in Rabat for the final of the 2026 Women’s Africa Cup of Nations, they were ranked 153rd in the world and had never before qualified for the tournament. They left Morocco with a silver medal, a place at the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Brazil, and something considerably harder to quantify: the undivided attention and affection of a nation that, until a few weeks earlier, could not have named most of their squad.
They lost the final 3-0 to a Cameroon side playing in its accustomed register of composure and experience. But the manner of the loss barely dented the size of the achievement. Along the way, the Scorchers had beaten Nigeria, ten-time African champions and the tournament’s most decorated side, in their opening match. They had matched Egypt, ground past Ghana from behind, absorbed a defeat to Zambia without losing their nerve, and out-fought Algeria in a bruising semi-final to reach a final no Malawian team, male or female, had ever reached before. That run alone secured Malawi’s first-ever qualification to a FIFA World Cup, an achievement that outranks the medal itself in historical weight.
None of that was supposed to happen. That is precisely why it is worth sitting with.
I watched this tournament through a particular lens. During the World Cup, I did not watch a single live match. I was mourning my mother, Christina Yapatula Nyang’ona Ng’ambi. During much of the WAFCON competition, I made a conscious decision not to follow every match as I ordinarily would. I watched only the games in which the Scorchers played. That narrowing was not indifference to the wider competition; it was, if anything, the opposite. It meant that every minute I gave to football in that period, I gave to watching Malawi women play. And it is impossible to write about what those women achieved without thinking of the women who shape my own life: my mother, whose memory I was sitting with while the Scorchers rewrote what Malawian women’s football could be; my wife, my sisters, my daughters, my aunts, my nieces. This article is, ultimately, about all of them.
Belief as a discipline, not a mood.
Malawians are fond of the word “underdog,” often used as a consolation prize before the inevitable exit. The Scorchers did not use the word that way. By their own account, they travelled to Morocco to win the tournament, not merely to take part. That distinction matters. Belief, as this team demonstrated, is not a feeling one waits for before a big match; it is a working assumption adopted in advance of any evidence and then defended through preparation.
This is the lesson young Malawians most need from the Scorchers’ run: ambition does not require permission from your ranking, resources, or history. Malawi arrived in Morocco with neither Cameroon’s institutional pedigree nor Nigeria’s silverware. What they had was a settled conviction, drilled in long before the whistle, that they belonged on that pitch and could compete with anyone. A team that cries after losing a final is a team that believed, right up to the last whistle, it could win. That is not weakness. That is the precondition for anything worth achieving.
For a country where young people are routinely told, by circumstance, by the job market, by the slow churn of opportunity, to lower their expectations, the Scorchers offer a counter-instruction: calibrate your preparation to the size of your ambition, not your ambition to the size of your current standing.
The love that shows up as a system.
A less visible feature of the Scorchers’ campaign is what actually held it together once the whistle blew: not individual brilliance alone, but a squad that visibly trusted one another. Players who had been staring at defeat responded with composure rather than panic, most strikingly against Ghana, where they came from behind, and against Zambia, where a loss did not fracture the group’s cohesion. That kind of resilience is not manufactured on match day. It is built over months of a team repeatedly choosing to carry one another rather than compete for the ball, the headline, or the credit.
This is the second lesson, and it is the one this article most wants Malawians, especially Malawian women, to sit with honestly. The Scorchers succeeded partly because they behaved like sisters on the pitch: covering gaps, setting up chances they would not personally finish, celebrating each other’s goals as though they were their own. It is a model of solidarity that looks almost unremarkable in sport, yet is strikingly rare in wider Malawian public life, especially among women navigating spaces where they remain a minority.
Malawian women are quick, and rightly so, to name the structural obstacles men and patriarchal systems place in their way. What is spoken about far less honestly is how often women undermine each other on the way up, the gatekeeping among women already inside a room, the reluctance to mentor a younger woman who might one day be a peer or a rival, the readiness to tear down another woman’s ambition, appearance, or success rather than champion it. The Scorchers give the lie to the excuse that this competitiveness is natural or unavoidable among women in tight, high-pressure spaces. Eleven women who could easily have jostled for the ball, the spotlight, and the individual accolade instead built a campaign on making each other better. If that model can produce a WAFCON final, it can produce a boardroom, a ministry, or a cooperative.
Temwa and Tabitha: sisterhood as strategy
No story from the tournament makes this point as directly as that of Tabitha and Temwa Chawinga, sisters from Rumphi in northern Malawi who grew up playing football alongside boys before breaking through together at DD Sunshine in Lilongwe. Tabitha, the elder, built her career in Sweden, China, Italy, and now at Olympique Lyonnais in France, where she has won back-to-back league titles. Temwa followed a similar route through Sweden and China before becoming a two-time MVP in the United States’ NWSL with Kansas City Current.
What makes their story instructive is not simply that two sisters from the same household both became elite footballers. It is that Tabitha’s success was never a private achievement she kept to herself. By Temwa’s own account, her elder sister personally vouched for her and helped open the door to Europe when she was starting out. Two women who could have treated each other as competitors for scarce opportunity in a small footballing nation instead treated each other’s success as a shared resource. That choice paid off in the most literal way possible on the pitch: against Algeria in the semi-final, the sisters combined to score all three of Malawi’s goals, with Tabitha later crediting a “telepathic” understanding built from years of pulling for one another rather than against one another.
That is the whole argument in miniature. Tabitha did not need Temwa to fail in order for her own career to matter. Temwa’s rise did not diminish Tabitha’s standing as captain; it made the team, and by extension both of them, considerably harder to beat. Malawian women watching two sisters carry their country to a first-ever WAFCON final and a first-ever World Cup ticket have a live, undeniable example that lifting another woman is not charity. It is strategy.
A nation, briefly, agreeing with itself
The scale of the public response to the Scorchers’ run says something worth naming plainly. A country routinely divided along regional, party, and generational lines found, for a few weeks, a single thing to agree on. Social media influencers with no prior connection to Malawi adopted the Scorchers as their own. When the team returned home, Malawian Airlines arranged an all-female crew to fly them back, and female firefighters gave them a water salute on arrival. Small, symbolic decisions that were not lost on anyone watching. The half-joking claim now circulating among Malawian women that this proves women are ready to steer the country to economic success carries a serious point beneath the humour: competence, discipline and solidarity produced a result that politics has struggled to produce in years. The lesson is not that women are inherently better leaders than men. It is that the specific behaviours the Scorchers modelled- preparation over posturing, shared credit over hoarded credit, mutual reinforcement over rivalry- produce results, regardless of who practises them.
The ask
To Malawian youth: the Scorchers were ranked 153rd in the world and still reached a continental final. Rank is a starting point, not a verdict. Prepare as though the outcome is still undecided, because it is.
For Malawian women, the ask is more specific and uncomfortable. Complaining about men is the easy half of the ledger; it costs nothing, requires no self-examination, and changes no woman’s behaviour. Refusing to undercut another woman is the expensive half, and it is the half too often left unpaid. It means not withholding the introduction that could help her. Not gossiping about the promotion she got instead of you. Not treating her visibility as a threat to yours. Not making her the exception you help while making every other woman coming up behind her fight for scraps you never had to fight for. The Scorchers did not reach a WAFCON final by each player privately hoping her teammate would miss the chance, mistime the run, or take too much credit. They reached it because eleven women decided, match after match, that another woman’s goal was a win for the whole team and not a loss for anyone standing next to her.
If Malawian women want to invoke this team’s success as proof that women are ready to lead the country to economic prosperity, and the joke carries real weight, then the standard has to be set by the same team, not just borrowed from its scoreboard. Tabitha did not vouch for Temwa and then spend the next decade reminding her of the favour. She built a partnership that made them both harder to stop. That is the only version of “women supporting women” worth repeating: not a slogan recited between complaints about men, but a discipline practised toward the women in the same room, the same office, the same party, the same market stall, the ones closest enough to actually compete with, and closest enough to actually lift.
Malawi does not have a shortage of capable women. It has a shortage of capable women willing to organise around each other with the same discipline the Scorchers showed for ninety minutes at a time, all the way to Rabat. The medal is silver. That discipline, applied beyond football, is worth considerably more, and unlike the medal, it is entirely within reach without anyone’s permission.
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