The Education Sector Performance Review (ESPR), commonly referred to as the Joint Sector Review (JSR), is a grand, much-anticipated annual event. It is where stakeholders in Malawi’s education sector take stock of progress over the past year, and agree on priorities and targets for the next year, in the broader context of mid and long-term policy goals. The 2023 JSR was held on Wednesday 11th and Thursday 12th October, at the Bingu International Convention Centre, in Lilongwe.
The keynote address was delivered by Esme Kadzamira, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Malawi Centre for Educational Research and Training (CERT). Kadzamira is Malawi’s foremost educational researcher. Her keynote address was titled “Transforming Education: Investing in Foundational Learning and Skills Development for a Wealthy Self-reliant and Resilient Nation.” It was a powerful and insightful overview of the education sector, from early childhood education to tertiary education. Kadzamira argued about how poor learning outcomes at the foundational level are having serious repercussions across the education system.
Some of the most important takeaways from this year’s JSR point to where the system is bleeding, but also offer fascinating prospects on what is being done to achieve transformation towards 2030 goals and beyond. The ESPR draws mostly from the Annual School Census (ASC), an activity under the Education Management Information System - EMIS (the ASC and EMIS are used interchangeably in the rest of this article). Together, the ESPR and the ASC present most current education statistics and developments in Malawi, enabling evidence-informed decision making in the sector. This year’s ESPR was unflinching in presenting some of the most troubling statistics.
The costs of repetition
Using rounded up figures, the Annual School Census for 2023 shows that 1.3 million primary school learners are repeating a class this year. Given a current enrolment of 5.3 million primary school learners, the number of repeaters represents 26 percent of the student population. The 2023 ESPR report shows that as a country, we are spending K48,000 ($40) per primary school learner. This computes to K62.4 billion ($52.8 million), 10 percent of the nominal education budget allocation of K603.36 billion ($511.3 million), as presented in Parliament in March 2023. The percentage goes up to 13 percent if we use the real budget as approved, at K478.5 billion ($405.5 million), according to the 2023 ESPR. Chitipa district has the highest repetition rate in the country this year, at 35 percent. It is followed by Mwanza district, which has a 33 percent repetition rate. The lowest repetition rate is in Mzuzu City, at 13 percent, with Zomba Urban coming second lowest, at 15 percent. Ultimately, such high repetition rates are a major contributor to students being pushed out of the system. The 2023 EMIS shows that only one out of four primary school learners makes it to Standard 8.
The problem of repetition is less pronounced at the secondary school level. The 2023 EMIS shows that there are currently 12,874 secondary school students repeating. According to the ESPR, the country is spending K190,000 ($161) per secondary school student, which means K2.4 billion ($2 million) is being spent on secondary school repeaters.
Internal and external factors
There are internal and external factors responsible for these problems. Many primary school classes, especially in the early grades, are larger than the average national teacher-pupil ratio of 1:62. This makes teaching and learning stressful and inefficient. The ESPR also shows that there are serious textbook shortages in primary schools, with up to 11 learners sharing one textbook, for subjects including English, Chichewa and Mathematics, in the middle classes. When learners have no textbooks, very little learning happens, and intrinsic motivation dwindles. School infrastructure in the public system is dilapidated, with many dysfunctional toilets and classrooms that are not fit for purpose.
Externally, widespread economic hardship makes it difficult for households to support their children for education success. Yet parents are increasingly being asked to contribute financially to keep some school services running. There are also problems with access to early childhood care and education, where only half of the caregivers are professionally trained, and those on government payroll are paid K20,000 (($17) per month. The government’s investment in early childhood education is miniscule, with 0.02 percent of the national budget allocated to the sub-sector in 2023. The result is that many learners enter primary school not fully prepared. All these conditions collude to make schooling difficult and inefficient, with many learners failing to succeed, leading to repetitions and dropouts. While there are 5.3 million primary school learners, there are only 485,650 secondary school students in 2023.
Secondary school is very selective
In her keynote address, Kadzamira pointed out that given how selective the secondary school system is, its performance is “unsatisfactory”. In the 2023 Malawi School Certificate of Education (MSCE) examination results, only 54.4 percent of the students passed. Not only is secondary education in Malawi highly selective, it is also very unequal. The examination results bring this reality into sharp focus. There are five broad categories of secondary schools in Malawi, namely Boarding, Day, Community Day, Open, and Private. There is further categorisation under each broad type.
The Annual School Census shows that in 2023, the country has 77 boarding secondary schools, 61 Day secondary schools, 805 community day secondary schools, 419 open secondary schools, and 424 private secondary schools. The total number is presented as 1,350 in the ASC. It should be noted that the 419 open secondary schools are not separate individual secondary schools. Students in the Open system are enrolled by existing public secondary schools and attend school in the afternoon, after the government-enrolled students who attend in the morning.
In the 2023 MSCE results, conventional secondary school students (boarding and day) comprised 26 percent of all candidates, and their pass rate was 68 percent. CDSS students comprised 50 percent of all candidates, and their pass rate was 45.5 percent. Students who took the exam via the Open and Distance Learning (ODL) route constituted 25 percent of all candidates, and their pass rate was 51 percent. Another category, 12 percent, sat the exam as external students, and their pass rate was 42 percent.
Several factors make secondary education inefficient, and as the ESPR makes clear, funding is one of them. But of greater concern are shortages of qualified teachers in particular subjects. The 2023 ASC reports that out of 18,811 secondary school teachers in the country, 3,896 teachers are not qualified to teach any subject, representing 20 percent. In the sciences, the country has only 555 qualified physics teachers, 404 qualified chemistry teachers, and 819 qualified agriculture teachers. Life Skills has 247 qualified teachers, while only 222 are qualified to teach Computer Studies.
Teacher shortages in the arts and creative subjects are even more shocking. The country has only 4 qualified Creative Arts teachers, 7 qualified teachers in Music and in Craft Design, and 14 qualified teachers in Performing Arts. Clothing and Textile has 6 qualified teachers, Woodwork has 49, and Technical Drawing has 56. There are only 15 qualified teachers for Principles of Accounting.
The government aims to strengthen the teaching of technical and vocational subjects in secondary schools, as one means of developing human capital and driving the three Malawi 2063 pillars of agricultural production and commercialisation, industrialisation, and urbanisation. A Skills Needs Assessment Report released in March 2023 by the Skills for a Vibrant Economy (SAVE) project found skills gaps in the key areas of the Malawi 2063 agenda, including agriculture, education, health, energy, industry, and ICT. It is imperative for teacher education institutions to introduce more technical, vocational and creative arts subjects, and to produce more qualified teachers in the sciences and in Computer Studies.
University education is even more selective
In July 2023, the Ministry of Education released selection results for public universities. A total of 8,552 students were selected into the country’s six public universities. Out of these, 1,320 were from CDSSs, representing 15.9 percent, as reported by Malawi News’s Feston Malekezo. Considering that CDSS students made up half of the MSCE candidates, a lot of the public commentary that followed highlighted how the quality of education offered to the majority of students in the country was an issue to worry about.
The 8,552 student selected to public universities represented 5.5 percent of the total number of students who sat the MSCE in 2022, and 10 percent of those who passed. Figures on first year enrolment into private universities are not available, but the 2023 ESPR reports that there are currently 63,533 students studying in all of the country’s higher education institutions, public and private. (The 2023 ASC reports a different figure of 74,200 undergraduates, and 6,794 postgraduate students, totalling 80,994 students).
The National Council for Higher Education (NCHE), which coordinates selection into public universities, reported receiving 19,760 applications. Out of these, 18,471 were deemed eligible for selection into university. To be eligible, a student must have 6 credit passes, which should include English. Malawian universities are relatively small, which means that they are able to admit only the highest scoring students, cutting off at around 22 MSCE points for most of them. Programmes deemed more prestigious cut off at around 15 points. While NCHE’s eligibility criteria of 6 credit passes allows students with up to 36 points to be admitted into degree programmes, the cut off points in the public universities mean that students scoring between 23 and 36 points do not even attempt to apply for selection. The number of students whose points lie between 23 and 36 is unknown.
Private universities face the opposite problem, as most of them are under-enrolled. Government subsidizes fees in public universities, at about K4 million ($3,400) per student. Private universities are not subsidised, which makes their fees higher than in public universities. The Higher Education Students Loans and Grants Board disburses loans to eligible students in both public and private universities, but the amounts are capped based on fees in public universities. Thus private universities are beyond the reach of many Malawians. Even with government loans, many students in both public and private universities still struggle, and some drop out altogether.
In July 2023 several public universities announced raises in tuition fees. In one university, fees went up from K350,000 ($300) to K650,000 ($3,800). Since then, students have been protesting these fee increases. One public university has been closed after protests turned violent. Given major financial problems in the universities, in the face of dwindling government funding, the universities had very little choice but to raise the fees. Rather than asking universities to bring the fees down, as the students are (understandably) suggesting, the government needs to increase funding to the universities, including increasing the allocation given to the Loans Board. This is the only realistic course of action to ensure that students who need financial aid receive it, and that universities are able to raise the funds they need to operate.
The Loans Board supports students pursuing undergraduate degree programmes only, but not postgraduate students. This is a problem that needs to be addressed. The 6,794 postgraduate students as reported in the 2023 ASC shows that postgraduate education and research in Malawi is hugely underdeveloped. In previous years the National Commission for Science and Technology has supported a small number postgraduate students, but the fact remains that most postgraduate students in the country are self-funded.
Raising ambitions: The road to 2030 and beyond
The Malawi Government needs to continue prioritising education, and ensuring that the sector gets 20 percent of the national budget or higher. A key consideration needs to go to enhancing the welfare of primary school teachers, who have a huge responsibility to make schooling interesting and relevant to learners and to communities. There is an urgent need to improve the morale of teachers, by offering special benefits to them, and improving their initial education as well as professional development. The current effort to elevate the primary school teacher certificate to a diploma and degree needs to be fast-tracked. During a breakout session at the JSR, it was pointed out that applications for primary teacher training colleges have been going down.
The country needs to look at the education sector in a holistic way. The economic hardships that many families are experiencing need to be addressed. That will ensure that households are able to support the schooling needs of their children, and that entire communities are able to support the education ecosystem.
The country also needs to address the bottleneck that has prevented the government from recruiting new teachers and improving the teacher-pupil ratio. This boils down to negotiations with the IMF around the public expenditure caps, which are a broader problem of current national debt. The 1:60 Teacher-Pupil Ratio, introduced in 2008, has never been achieved. It is outdated. It needs to be revised to a smaller, more conducive number not more than 35. That requires recruiting the more than 18,000 primary school teachers who have been trained in the last five years and are just roaming the streets unemployed. It also means increasing the number of teachers who need to be trained.
For the first time in the history of the United Nations, the 2022 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) included the Transforming Education Summit, convened by the UN Secretary General. President Dr. Lazarus Chakwera presented Malawi's National Statement of Commitment to Transforming Education. Amongst the commitments the President laid out was making the teaching profession "prestigious." That was a powerful promise that the country must take practical steps to fulfil. Government’s actions and programmes need to be aimed at elevating the teaching profession to make it truly prestigious.
The Ministry of Education is developing a national strategy for open distance and e-learning, which it hopes will revolutionise access to education at all levels. The strategy has the potential to provide secondary and tertiary education to a far bigger number of Malawians than the brick and mortar system can manage. Enrolment targets for 2030 therefore need to be revised to more ambitious numbers, especially at the tertiary level. The Malawi Open University, first mooted in 2014, should be made an urgent priority. The long-term national vision, the Malawi 2063, aims for every Malawian to access education from early childhood and to complete secondary education.
The target for higher education is set at 85,000, but that is too low, considering the projected number of Malawians who will be of college age by 2030. The National Statistics Office projects that by 2030, there will be 4.8 million Malawians in the age category of 15-24 years. A target of 85,000 computes to 1.7 percent, lower than the current tertiary enrolment rate of 3 percent. Malawi aims to become a Lower Middle Income Country (LMIC) by 2030, a category whose tertiary enrolment rate is 25 percent.
For Malawi to achieve that rate, it will need to have 1.2 million people in the 18-24 years age cohort studying in higher education institutions. The 2018 Population and Housing Census revealed that 92.9 percent of adult Malawians do not have a secondary school education, and that 70.1 percent do not have any school qualification. What this means is that the numbers of people craving for education broadly, and higher education in particular, are much higher. The country needs to devise innovative ways of widening access to higher education of good quality.
Making higher education available to millions of Malawians will mean increasing the budget for the Loans Board so that it can fully support as many students needing financial aid as possible. The private sector, which reaps massive profits from the public education system, needs to embrace a public mission and invest in human capital development at a magnitude much bigger than the current corporate social responsibility efforts. We need to have a national discussion on Shareholder responsibilities to public purpose around investing in the education system. The country needs to set new, more ambitious targets for postgraduate education, especially doctoral and post-doctoral research.
Currently there are no such targets at the national level. Specific emphasis needs to be put on funding postgraduate research in science, technology and innovation, which should include engineering, the arts and the humanities, and mathematics. The advent of Artificial Intelligence has put the world on the cusp of rapid, unprecedented technological transformation, which can be harnessed for positive outcomes, or can be hijacked for nasty eventualities. Given the country’s perennial social and economic challenges, there is an imperative to multiply the creative and innovative potential of young Malawians. The Malawi University of Science and Technology has established the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and STEAM (CAIST), taking the lead on that front.
A new collaborative initiative between the Malawi Government and development partners, called Building Education Foundations through Innovation and Technology (BEFIT), promises unprecedented potential to utilise educational technology and increase efficiency in the education system. The government's goal is for every learner in Standards 1 to 4 to have access to a tablet, and for all primary school teachers to be trained in how to use the technology, by 2029. In schools that have already started benefitting from the initiative, enrolment and retention are reported to have already improved.
The creative potential that can arise out of this combination can offer an education transformation of immense proportions. In 2022, the National Planning Commission published a book titled Malawi Priorities: A Benefit-Cost Analysis for Policy Prioritisation, where Technology-Assisted Learning (TAL) was recommended to be among the important strategies to transform primary education in Malawi.
The current 10-year education plan, the National Education Sector Investment Plan (NESIP) 2020-2030 needs to be seen as a dynamic, flexible policy recommendation that can be adjusted and improved along the way. Completed in 2020, there have been major developments since then that need to become part of the education policy and implementation response. For example, the Malawi 2063 First Ten Year implementation Plan (MIP-1) provides for an early childhood education programme at every primary school, by 2025. NESIP targets needs to be revised and updated to reflect new realities and ambitions.
Future JSRs need to widen stakeholder participation and should include the National Planning Commission and the National Commission for Science and Technology. The JSRs should also bring on board sectors that have a strong role in developing human capital. Students need to be part of the JSR. Ministries responsible for health, finance and economic planning, agriculture, and local government need to be present at the JSR, so that they are part of the discussion to transform Malawi’s education system.
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