Every time Malawi rushes out another round of oral vaccines, the country is reminded that you cannot inject your way out of a water crisis.

Development Diaries reports that authorities in the southern African country have rolled out oral cholera vaccination in response to cholera pressure, alongside warnings about prevention.

It is understood that vaccines can stop an outbreak, but cholera itself grows where governance fails, where water systems collapse long before bacteria arrive, and where sanitation is treated as an emergency instead of a basic right.

The new vaccination rollout shows a government eager to contain the immediate danger, with health workers moving, loudspeakers blaring safety tips, and families lining up with hope in their hands.

But anyone familiar with Malawi’s long battle with cholera knows this script too well. The rush to vaccinate has become an annual ritual because the real solutions, which are clean water, working toilets, and functioning drainage, never come with the same speed or urgency.

This is where the system is breaking. Public health prevention is expected to do the heavy lifting while water and sanitation governance sits quietly in the background.

Communities still fetch water from sources everyone knows are unsafe, as toilets collapse and stay unfixed for years, with local councils reporting the same broken boreholes.

Also, outbreak response teams seem to arrive faster than water engineers. With this level of neglect, cholera becomes less of a surprise and more of a predictable consequence.

On this matter, no single institution is blameless, because health ministries understand the weight of repeated outbreaks, yet they cannot prevent them alone.

Water ministries know which communities lack safe water, yet their budgets move more slowly than the disease. And for local councils, they see the sanitation failures every day but have limited power to act.

Even donors contribute to this imbalance when they favour emergency response over long-term water infrastructure that would prevent the emergencies in the first place.

And the people paying the highest price are not those sitting in air-conditioned offices, because cholera first hits children whose bodies are most vulnerable.

This disease spreads fastest in informal settlements where clean water is a luxury, and it lingers in rural communities where a long walk to a river is the only option, exposing deeper inequalities that vaccines alone cannot hide.

Safe water, like a clean environment, is a right. The ability to live without constant fear of preventable disease is also a right. Therefore, every outbreak is a reminder that these rights remain fragile for too many Malawians.

Citizens are already doing their part, even if quietly, as communities are asking where vaccines are actually available. They are questioning why some neighbourhoods get attention while others wait.

Government institutions must match this energy. The vaccination drive should come with a clear WASH action plan that the public can see and measure. Outbreak updates should be regular and honest to include coverage numbers, stock-outs, challenges, and progress.

For their part, health and water ministries must work as one system, not separate silos, and donors must shift from responding to emergencies to helping prevent them.

Malawi has the tools to defeat cholera, but vaccines alone are not the cure. As long as communities remain thirsty for clean water and flush toilets exist only on paper, outbreaks will continue to return. Ending cholera is about governing better.