Malawi - Infrastructure, power, and communications Malawi's
infrastructure is in urgent need of attention. Its road and rail
networks are inadequate both in their quality and extent, a
problem made more serious by the country's reliance on land
transport to compensate for its lack of sea access. While the
road system has been expanded by 44 percent since independence
in 1964, Malawi's population in the same period has doubled; of
its 28,394 kilometers (17,647 miles) of road, only 5,833
kilometers (3,265 miles) are paved (18.5 percent). The poor
condition of the roads has contributed to Malawi having one of
the worst road accident rates in the world— despite its very low
car-to-person ratio of 2 per 1,000. Rail, too, is in
considerable disrepair, having been very badly affected by
Mozambique's long civil war in the 1980s and 1990s, which closed
off Malawi's access to the Indian Ocean ports of Nacala and
Beira, once the distribution hubs of 95 percent of all Malawian
trade. Starved of this traffic, on which it