Malawi’s education crisis and the use of evidence in policy, planning and practice

When the report of the 2018 Malawi Population and Housing Census was released in May 2019, there was one statistic that I found astounding. Amongst 14-17 year-old Malawian youths, the official secondary school age bracket, 82 percent of them were not in school. Only 18 percent were. I expected this statistic, which I considered to be a national crisis, to make front page and news headlines. It did not. Perhaps understandably. The focus was on the overall population figure, the percentage of young people, and other equally important findings. The education statistics largely went unnoticed.

Photo credit: © Steve Sharra

On the evening of Monday 7^th December this week, President Dr. Lazarus Chakwera hosted representatives from private industry for a state dinner at Sanjika Palace to address this issue. As far as I can recall, this was the first time in living memory that a president convened a key stakeholder constituency to discuss a particular problem facing the education sector. Finally, this national scandal has attracted the attention of the highest political office in the country. I would have missed it, had it not been for a colleague who stumbled upon the event on MBC TV, and alerted us on a professional whatsapp forum. For some reason, there seems to have been very little publicity ahead of the event.

I dropped everything I was doing, went to the TV, and found the Secretary for Education, Ms. Chikondano Mussa, presenting the status of secondary school education in the country. She had new figures. From 82 percent of 14-17 year-olds being out of school as of 2018, the figure was now at 86 percent in 2020. Out of over 1.7 million youths in that age range, only 460,000 are in school. There was one textbook for every five students, and only 24 percent of secondary school students were able to complete four years per cycle. The secondary school sub-sector loses 11 percent of its students every year, and 3 percent repeat. Only 6 percent are able to proceed to university. There was a shortage of science teachers, as well as teaching and learning materials.

Community Day Secondary Schools, originally introduced as distance education centres which have evolved into community secondary schools, bear the brunt of the quality conundrum. There are 753 of them in the country, and 303 of them operate what are known as open secondary schools. Open Secondary Schools accommodate an afternoon school system as a way of extending secondary education access to those who cannot find space in the conventional system. They also take in adults who want to return to school.

Community and open secondary schools take up almost 60 percent of the entire secondary school population. Of the 10,000 or so secondary school students who proceed to university annually, only 15 percent come from community and open secondary schools. The majority, 85 percent, come from better-resourced national and district boarding secondary schools, as well as from prestigious private secondary schools.

When it was her turn to speak, the Minister of Education, Hon. Agnes NyaLonje likened the enrollment bottleneck to a 6-lane highway at the primary level, narrowing down to a single-lane highway at the secondary level, ending up as a dirt road at the tertiary level. The country’s tertiary enrollment rate is less than one percent; to be precise, 0.8 percent. It is the lowest tertiary enrollment rate in the world, according to UNESCO statistics. As I pointed out in a recent blog post, this incredibly low tertiary enrollment rate is the ultimate result of access problems that clog the entire education pipeline, right from early childhood education where only one in three Malawian children has access.

Hon. NyaLonje presented what she termed three key messages to the captains of industry gathered at the presidential dinner. The first key message was the power of data, or evidence, in formulating and implementing education policies. She pointed out how important and powerful it was to know the shocking extent of Malawian youths who were out of the school system. Her second key message was for everyone to recognize how strategically positioned secondary school education was, between primary and tertiary education, in an interconnected education system. The third key message was directed at the captains of industry themselves. Thus far, Malawi had heavily relied upon development partners for investments into the country’s education system. Malawians were now ready, observed the Minister, to take up the lead in investing in the country’s education so that all Malawians have access to quality and inclusive education. “The transformed Malawi that we want is within our grasp”, she said.

Ms. NyaLonje then laid out an immediate vision and a long-term vision for the country’s education sector. The immediate vision was the construction of 34 top quality secondary schools, one in each education district, to be centres of education excellence, in the model of Kamuzu Academy. At a minimum, these schools would cost MK100 billion (approx $133 million) to become operational. The long-term vision was for adequate quality infrastructure at all the levels of the education sector, so that all Malawian children, youths and young adults can go to school and attain a good quality education.  

What did Malawi’s private industry stand to gain by generously investing in the quality of Malawi’s secondary schools? Hon. NyaLonje pointed out at that quality education was a catalyst to achieving Malawi’s dream of becoming a middle-income country. A high quality education would produce high quality graduates who would turn around the fortunes of Malawian companies and industries, enabling them to improve their productivity and expand their growth. And that would also grow the country’s economy and generate more resources to improve the lives of Malawians. Improving the quality of education in the country is therefore in their own interest, as the ultimate beneficiaries of highly educated and skilled graduates, as the Minister exhorted.

It may have taken two years since the National Statistics Office showed the nation the extent of the challenges facing the country’s education system, but the matter has finally drawn the attention of the president. In his speech, the president expressed his own shock at the figures, and used the imagery of a mirror that reflects the true image of how one looks.

In the four or so months she has been Minister of Education, Hon. NyaLonje has used every occasion she has had to stress the role of research and evidence in Malawi’s education policymaking and implementation process. The Ministry of Education has developed a remarkable capacity for collecting and analyzing education data, and has been making this data publicly available for many years. How that data has been used to inform education policymaking has not been very clear.

One month ago today, on 9^th November, the Ministry released the 2020 Education Sector Performance Review report. The report revealed some new education data since last year’s report. Secondary school enrollment had increased to 415,000 students, and that there were 13,000 more male students that females. There were 1,494 secondary schools in the country, and 55 percent of them did not have science laboratories. The availability of electricity was quite impressive, with 82 percent of secondary schools connected to either the national grid, or alternative energy sources.

The importance of data and evidence in policy making is crucial not only to education, but to the entire public policy architecture. However, the very idea of data and evidence itself needs a critical perspective. Some of the education statistics presented by the Minister of Education and the Secretary of Education at Sanjika Palace on Monday differ from the statistics presented in the 2020 Education Sector Performance Review report released four weeks ago.

For example, the Secretary for Education presented the total secondary school enrollment as 460,000, yet the 2020 ESPR report puts the figure at 415,000. Even in the 2020 ESPR itself, there are two different figures for the total number of secondary schools. On page 69 of the ESPR the total number of secondary schools in the country is given as 1,494. This shows a slight increase from the number given in the 2018 Education Management Information System (EMIS), which was 1,486.

The 2020 ESPR says the number of public secondary schools in the country stands at 884, but it does not give the total number of private secondary schools. The 2018 EMIS gave the total number of private secondary schools as 353. The 2020 ESPR gives the total primary school enrollment as just under 5.3 million, while the Secretary for Education said the figure was around 6 million.  

Some of the confusion with the numbers arises from the way secondary schools are classified. What are called Open Secondary Schools are not separate, independent schools with their own structures. They are afternoon classes that take place on the premises of existing secondary schools, but are counted as separate schools, for administrative purposes. On Monday the Secretary for Education said there were 303 of these. There has not been another EMIS since the 2018 version, which was released in 2019. The 2020 EMIS, when released, will hopefully present more accurate, harmonized figures.

While using data is important, it is much more important for that data to be accurate. To its credit, the Ministry of Education has a highly developed capacity in data collection and analysis, despite other challenges. These are challenges that will gradually be overcome, especially now that the importance of data will become even more prominent in the policy making and implementation process.

The immediate vision of the Ministry to establish 34 new high quality secondary schools also deserves comment. When the late Dr. Hasting Kamuzu Banda constructed the Kamuzu Academy, he said it was modelled after Eton College, an exclusive, boys-only boarding school in England. Eton is famous for educating members of the British royal family and ruling class. Critics said the Kamuzu Academy was an ‘Eton in the bush,’ and saw it as a lavish, elitist undertaking. Kamuzu’s idea was for the school to educate future generations of Malawian leaders, based on British standards. He declared, at a public rally, that no mutu biii (impolite term for ‘black person’) could teach at Kamuzu Academy. The school enrolled two students from each of the then-24 districts of the country, one male and one female.

To date, Kamuzu Academy has produced individuals who have gone on to leadership positions in Malawi. When Kamuzu relinquished power in 1994, Kamuzu Academy was fully privatized and started enrolling only those students who could afford the exorbitant fees. When Bingu wa Mutharika was president, he resumed the practice of enrolling top students from the districts and paying for their school fees, but this stopped when he died in 2012.

Constructing 34 such top schools, one in each district, is as ambitious as it is bold. If it would operate on the original model of Kamuzu Academy, enrolling top performing, less privileged students from the districts and offering them scholarships, it would provide a high quality education to a group of young, poor Malawians who would otherwise not be able to afford such an expensive education.

As others have pointed out, the Ministry’s immediate vision as expressed by the Minister stops short of addressing the other glaring problem of education quality in the secondary school sector. Almost 60 percent of the country’s secondary school students attend community and open secondary schools, known to have the worst problems in terms of qualified teachers, infrastructure and teaching and learning materials. This challenge also needs its own immediate vision. It should be part of the national vision that every Malawian has access to education quality of the highest standards, rather than make it the preserve of just a few. Obviously this cannot be achieved overnight; it is a gradual process requiring massive investments and long term planning. As Professor Augustine Musopole has argued, Malawi also needs to develop a home-grown philosophy of education, based on a Malawian and regional worldview.

It is very pleasing to note that on the evening of the presidential dinner, the private sector present pledged MK400 million toward the 34 top schools initiative. Press Trust pledged MK300 million. Other pledges are expected soon, as corporations consult their boards to decide how much they can contribute. We will need to broaden our views on how to finance the education sector so as to raise the MK100 billion. We will need much more than that to achieve the long-term vision of high quality education for every Malawian. 

Speaking when he launched the investor education week earlier on the same Monday, 7th December, the Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of Malawi, Dr. Grant Kabango said Malawi's pension assets had reached MK 1 trillion (approx. $1.3 billion) as of 30th September 2020. The Ministry of Education together with the Ministries of Finance and Economic Planning & Development will need to explore how these pension funds, currently lying idle, can be leveraged to finance the much beleaguered education sector.  

Photo credit: © Steve Sharra 

The challenges in our education system ought to be a top priority for us all. Outside private industry and development partners, alumni networks also have the potential of making massive contributions to addressing these challenges. There are countries where alumni take their responsibilities towards their former secondary schools very seriously. In Ghana, for example, alumni form networks that take a direct interest in the state of their former secondary schools. Cabinet ministers, army generals, captains of industries and others who have become influential in society take an active role in the welfare of their former schools, ensuring that they are well managed and adequately resourced, and maintain their national prestige.

Now that the problem of young Malawians who are out of the school system has drawn the attention of the country’s leadership, it is time to have a national conversation on how to address this problem. It must, however, be addressed alongside other equally pressing problems. These include the development of a Malawian philosophy of education, access to inclusive, quality tertiary education, and Malawian adults who never attended school. The Fifth Integrated Household Survey 2020 report, released in November, gives another shocking statistic: 80.7 percent of Malawians aged 5 and above do not have any school qualification.

It will be futile for us to address the problems of the education system, without addressing the broader problem of this large majority who do not have a meaningful education that can help them participate in and contribute to community and national development.  As we gingerly step into the new decade, toward the 2030 agenda, and toward the year 2063 in our long-term national vision and continental aspiration, education, and the teaching profession, will have to take a central role.

Kicking away the JCE ladder

Let me start with a disclaimer. I am not an expert in educational measurement, evaluation and assessment. These are highly specialised areas in educational research dealing with tests and examinations, and Malawi has quite a number of experts in the disciplines. My familiarity lies with curriculum, pedagogy, educational policy and teacher education. So my views in the ensuing discussion pertain to the policy implications of the decision, by the Malawi government, to abolish the Junior Certificate of Education (JCE), in the broader context of Malawi’s education system.

Several factors make the decision to abolish the JCE a monumental one. Debate on the JCE has been around for some time, although it was rather informal and sporadic. There have been research studies on educational assessment in Malawi, and a recommendation to abolish the JCE goes back to 2004, according to a study titled Student testing and assessment reform done by Kadzamira, E., Moleni, K., Kholowa, F., Nkhoma, M., Zoani, A., Chonzi, R., and Chigeda, A.

According to a 2013 article by Dr. Bob Chulu, Dean of the Faculty of Education at Chancellor College, in the journal Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, research studies in assessment have shown that school-based assessments are more effective than national examinations. The Malawi Government has been gradually evolving toward continuous assessment as a more effective mode of evaluating students.

Sooner or later, the JCE was going to be abolished, more for reasons of educational efficiency and the improvement of teaching and learning, than for economic exigency. It was only a matter of how and when to make the decision. Two questions now stare us in the face. First, whether the manner in which the decision has been arrived at has taken care of all the cautions issued and recommendations made by research studies. Second, where do we go from here?

As reported by the Daily Times of Monday21st September, the decision to abolish the JCE has come as part of the on-going Public Service Reform Programme (PSRP). Government ministries, agencies and parastatals are doing internal scrutiny and deciding for themselves how and what to reform. The suggestions are taken to the PSRP Commission, where they are further scrutinised and debated, before making a decision on them and passing it on to the president. What this means is that the changes announced last week came from MANEB itself. The president merely approved them, probably after being convinced, by way of the commission’s decision.

Writ large, the public service reforms are a much-needed and welcome change for Malawi. The country’s future depends on them. We cannot continue business as usual, lest we manifest Albert Einsten’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results each time (I just learned this is a mis-attribution). As long as the internal process itself is systematic, consultative, and rigorous, we can rest assured of a process that will bear good fruit. Whether that indeed is the case will be known in due course.

Coming to the JCE question, a number of factors complicate the way in which the decision has been made. The first factor is that the reforms are happening at a time when the Malawi economy is undergoing severe problems. While it is true that necessity is the mother of all inventions, the danger in our circumstances is that institutions may be tempted to think of reforms dictated more by economic necessity than by the desire for wholistic efficiency. There is great risk here that the economic factors could triumph over common sense and end up skewing the reforms. This is not to question the timing of the reforms. It is the perfect timing. But the risk for skewed reforms needs to be taken seriously. In any case, and as Austin Madinga pointed out on his Facebook page, “it had to start somewhere.”

The second complicating factor is the efficiency, or lack of it, of our educational system. The majority of Malawians who start school dropout and never finish. About 900,000 enter school every year and after seven years about 700,000 drop out, according to government statistics (ESIP II, 2014). Only about 90,000 make it to secondary school yearly. This decision means that we will have millions of Malawians who attended some schooling but left with nothing to show for it. Countries that do not have the equivalent of the JCE tend to be countries whose dropout rates are negligible. Ours are some of the highest on the planet.

The idea of having people request for their Standard 8 transcript means that the majority will choose not to for reasons others have pointed out. It is true that both the Standard 8 and the JCE certificates are no longer valuable for employment. But this is based on faulty thinking, as I will explain in a moment.

The third factor relates to the message being sent about the value of education up to Form 3, as I have pointed out elsewhere. This is an unintended consequence concealed in the justification given for the decision to abolish the examination. The message to students, teachers and parents is that none of this education is important, until a student reaches Form 4. This reasoning emanates from what we could call, for lack of a better term, the kick-away-the-ladder syndrome, borrowing from the South Korean and Cambridge University economics professor, Ha Choon Chang.

The argument given by the government, that the JCE has lost its value and is not demanded by employers emanates from this syndrome. It can only be made after one has ascended to the roof and now thinks one no longer needs the ladder. So one kicks it away. The success is being mistaken for the path. The fact that you have now reached the roof does not mean you did not need the ladder all along. Sending this message about the value, or lack thereof, of education up to Form 3 can erode seriousness amongst students, teachers and parents. Though unintended, it is the wrong message to send.

The fourth factor is using employment demands to drive educational policy. This is a tricky one. While it is undeniable that employment is an overriding aim of education, focusing strictly on employment demands restricts the purposes of education. The purpose of education, as the late Tanzanian president Mwalimu Julius Nyerere pointed out in 1968, is to prepare students to thrive in and contribute positively to their society. People contribute to society in more ways than dictated by employment demands. Democratic citizenship is an equally important purpose of education, which should not play second fiddle to employment demands.

The fifth factor complicating this decision is the speed and volume of the changes. There have been no less than four major educational changes announced in a space of eleven days in September alone. And more are coming. There is a new secondary school curriculum now. There are new national educational standards. Many simultaneous changes could potentially send a shockwave through the education system. I don't envy the Ministry of Education officials, DEMs, PEAs and head teachers who have to implement all these radical changes all at once. We should consider introducing them in phases to allow for an orderly change management process.

In getting rid of the JCE, MANEB has offered continuous assessment as a replacement. Dr. Chulu observed, in his journal article, that continuous assessment was suggested to MANEB several years ago, and MANEB rejected it for reasons to do with security and reliability. Now that MANEB seems to have changed its mind, it is time to revisit the models suggested by assessment experts. Continuous assessment is not easy to conduct.

A pilot study done in Ntcheu in the early 2000s found that although it improved student performance, it was taxing. Teachers found it very demanding, especially in large classes. Teachers implementing continuous as part of the current Primary Curriculum and Assessment Reform (PCAR) have since complained that they spend more time filling forms and recording numbers than preparing for teaching. Rather than improve teaching and learning, this form of busy work has worsened matters.

Moving forward after the abolition of JCE will require meticulous caution. There will be need to consult widely, from students to teachers to parents and other stakeholders. Continuous assessment works in contexts where classes are small. The target of 60 students per teacher which Malawi has been aiming at for the past decade is far from the ideal, as anyone who has taught young people will testify. The only reason that ratio appears in our policy documents is because the status quo is unimaginable. We have perhaps the highest teacher-pupil ratios in the world. The official one appearing in policy documents, 1:78, is far from the reality on the ground. The national ratio obscures the true numbers in the lower grades.

Teachers need to be well educated, and resources need to be available for continuous assessment to succeed. A Zambian study on continuous assessment confirmed the problems caused by large classes and lack of teaching and learning resources (Kapambwe, 2010). It also identified student absenteeism and poor monitoring and feedback by district officials as other compounding factors.

These challenges are common to Malawi as well. If the money saved from these decisions does not go towards addressing the identified challenges and making conditions more conducive for continuous assessment, we will be courting worse disasters down the road.

There is a paradox about examinations. They influence teaching and learning because students, teachers and society tend to take them as the ultimate goal of education. They become self-reinforcing. This paradox extends to global educational role models. Finland, considered to have the best education system in the world, has only one national examination, taken at the end of secondary school. East Asia (China, Singapore, South Korea), which now produces the highest student performance scores in the world, relies on a heavy, punishing examination regimen. Some students commit suicide in the process.

A paradigm shift is underway in global education, moving from education for employment towards education for creativity and innovation. The rationale for this shift is that nobody can predict the world of the future, so it does not make sense to educate students for employment. Better to educate them for creativity and innovation so they can adapt their knowledge to solve problems unknown today. 

There are good models Malawi can learn from. But removing the examinations without a careful, deliberate process could create a vacuum that could paralyse the system. We need to proceed very carefully and put in place long term plans, guided by meaningful consultations. Or else we will be solving a few problems while creating bigger ones.

Malawi at Fifty One: The Education Legacies of Malawi's Presidents Hitherto

It is a noteworthy paradox that while the seventy years Malawi was under colonial rule from 1894 to 1964 there was no university, within nine months of independence, Malawi had one (Cuthbert Kachale, 2015). In ensuring that Malawi got a university just months after independence, the founding president of the country, Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda made clear the pioneering role that higher education was going to play in the development of the country.

However the advances our higher education system has accomplished have not been optimally used to improve the overall education system and classroom practices. I argue in the ensuing discussion, as we mark fifty one years of independence, that the failure to use the higher education system to improve the quality of teaching and the teaching profession has cost the country in development terms. 

When schooling is fun

The road to independence was tortuous and meandering. The first Malawians to become cabinet ministers were sworn in four years before independence. That year, 1961, Malawi’s population was 4 million people, according to the late Kanyama Chiume (1982), in his eponymous autobiography. In that year, the country had 30 university graduates, 7,100 Standard 8 candidates, and 500 secondary school spaces. As the first Minister of Education, Chiume knew that enrollment needed to rapidly increase at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels of the education system. He devoted the short time he spent as Minister of Education to pursuing that goal.

The efforts paid off. As independence came and Malawi poised herself to enter the decade of the seventies, enrollment at the primary level was expanding exponentially. According to Harvey Sindima (2002), by 1970 Malawi’s primary school enrollment had shot to 333,102, while that of secondary schools has increased to 9,686. A total of 977 Malawians were attending the University of Malawi. For the next two decades, the numbers kept doubling, as did the national population.

By 1990 Malawi had 1,325,453 primary school students, 16,432 secondary school students, and 1,620 university students. Expansion at the primary level did not correspond with expansion at secondary and tertiary level, leading to the lowest higher education enrollment rates in the world fifty years later (Government of Malawi, 2014). But Kamuzu’s penchant for prestige was best personified in the magnificent Kamuzu Academy, founded in 1981. An elite secondary school, it has educated a significant number of Malawians providing leadership in the public and private sectors, and internationally.

During Kamuzu Banda's reign, civil servants, including teachers, were posted to any part of the country, according to need. It did not matter where one came from. In 1989, Kamuzu Banda announced at a political rally that some teachers teaching away from their districts of origin were not dedicating themselves fully. He decreed that with immediate effect, teachers who were teaching away from their home districts should relocate to their home districts.

Most districts in the country were affected by this decree, as some lost huge numbers of teachers. Some have argued that teachers from the northern region of Malawi were the most affected. Thousands of them had been teaching in the central and southern regions, and were forced to return to the northern region. But there were also schools in the northern region which lost teachers as well. Some believe that the quality of education was drastically affected by this decree. In the absence of a substantive, detailed analysis, the jury is still out as regards the merits and demerits of the decree.

In terms of keeping pace with the population and providing quality education to as many Malawians as possible, doubling enrolment rates over the decades was insufficient. There was need for much more rapid rates of increase. That was left to Dr. Bakili Muluzi, the man who succeeded Dr. Kamuzu Banda to become Malawi’s second president. Muluzi pledged universal primary education, which entailed removing school fees from primary education and making it free. It became his first major education reform as soon as he was sworn in as president in 1994. The number of primary school learners went up from the 1.9 million it had reached in 1993, to 3.2 million in 1994. The Muluzi government recruited 20,000 new teachers that same year to become student teachers, teaching during the school year, and undergoing training in college during the holidays.

It was during Muluzi’s presidency that teacher development centres (TDCs) were introduced, numbering 315 across the country. The school inspection system was transformed from district-based inspectors to zone-based advisers, also numbering 315 to match the number of TDCs. Regional education offices (REO) were turned into education division offices, led by Education Division Managers (EDMs). The number went from three regional offices to six divisional offices.

A very ambitious plan to expand access to secondary school education envisioned the construction of 250 community day secondary schools. This would have increased the primary to secondary school transition rate from the erstwhile 11 percent, to 70 percent, according to Roy Hauya (1996). The country was able to establish new community day secondary schools, but not numbering the promised 250. In higher education, Muluzi’s administration gave Malawi its second university. What was Mzuzu Teachers’ Training College was converted into Mzuzu University, and became operational in 1999.

By the time Muluzi left office and was succeeded by Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika in 2004, the education system had come to be characterised by failures resulting from the shock of UPE. Class sizes had ballooned into hundreds, particularly for lower primary, and teacher morale was very low. Teaching and learning materials became scarce, and physical structures were in a state of disrepair. Bingu wa Mutharika sought to stabilise the system by pledging to adequately fund the sector at all levels from primary to tertiary. In his first term, from 2004 to 2009, the system experienced relative stability.

Mutharika had big plans for higher education. Talk of a new university started in his first term, and in his second term construction of the Malawi University of Science and Technology started. The university had initially been intended for Lilongwe, the capital city, but Bingu decided to move it to his home district in Thyolo, on land he said he had donated for that purpose.  By the time Bingu died in April 2012, the university was still under construction. It would be completed and opened during the presidency of his successor, Dr. Joyce Banda, becoming Malawi's fourth public university.

During Bingu's presidency, Bunda College of Agriculture, a constituent college of the University of Malawi, became an independent university. That brought the number of public universities in the country to three. Private universities, which were almost non-existence during Kamuzu's time, began thriving during Bingu's presidency. The government also moved to start regulating the higher education system, and the National Council for Higher Education was formed, becoming operational during Joyce Banda's rule. 

The two years Joyce Banda was president of Malawi were not enough for her to leave large visible footprints on the system. However it was while she was president that the country witnessed an unprecedented emphasis on girls’ education, an idea she championed both in public and in private. Towards the end of her tenure the Ministry of Education, Science and technology launched the National Girls Education Strategy and the Girls’ Communication Strategy. It was a befitting moment for Joyce Banda’s efforts to highlight the importance of keeping girls’ in school and reversing the troubling trend of so many girls dropping out due to early marriages.

There was a visible attempt during Joyce Banda’s presidency to bring teachers’ welfare to the fore. This was seen by some as an attempt to placate teachers after Dr Banda had made remarks that teachers had construed as demeaning of them. On two occasions she had alluded to how cattle farmers made more than teachers, betraying a lurking contempt.

The effort to address issues of teachers’ welfare came toward the end of her presidency. Joyce Banda’s last Minister of Education, Dr. Lucious Kanyumba, toured the whole country and met teachers. He spoke about what the ministry was doing to end chronic problems of late salaries and low teacher morale. Teachers told him of their problems. Coming during the high campaign season, with weeks to go before the election, many teachers saw it as a campaign ploy.

When Professor Peter Mutharika took over from Dr. Joyce Banda in May 2014, he picked up from where he had stopped during his older brother’s presidency. As Minister of Education in the late Bingu wa Mutharika’s presidency, Peter Mutharika first introduced the idea of community colleges in 2010. As soon as he was sworn in, he set about accomplishing that task. Midway through 2015, some community colleges have already started operating. President Mutharika has already embarked upon a project to construct another new university, in Mzimba district.

However at the primary and secondary school levels, the problem of teacher morale, the most significant of the problems afflicting Malawi’s education system, is getting worse. Today, anger amongst Malawian teachers has become so pervasive it severely corrodes the education system. In the first of 2015, salary delays took a turn for the worse. Leave grants and rural hardship allowances went unpaid for several months and many teachers in many districts stopped teaching. With communication from the ministry not forthcoming, teachers resorted to asking fellow teachers on facebook groups for updates. It is frightening to imagine how these angry, bitter, frustrated and demoralised teachers are treating children under their care.

Despite the difficulties, there are many teachers who continue dedicating themselves. There are teachers who are unleashing their creative energies in their classrooms and schools, inspiring children. There are teachers who are so hungry for more education and professional development they are going out of their way to find opportunities. There are Malawian teachers using the power of the Internet to connect with other teachers in Malawi and around the world. Most of them remain unrecognised and unrewarded, but they continue, undaunted, aiming at a higher prize: national development.

Can Malawi afford to make teaching a high-prized, coveted profession?

The first fifty years of Malawi’s existence as an independent nation have had their highs and their lows. When few Malawians had access to education, the quality was commendable. When more Malawians were afforded the opportunity to go to school, quality plummeted. Quality and quantity need not be mutually exclusive. The starting point for improving quality while expanding access needs to be the quality and welfare of teachers. As we turn fifty one years old, this needs to be top of our educational agenda.

What we have learned from the best educational systems on the planet is that investment in teachers is the most important factor for national development. When the teaching profession is highly prized, prestigious, and rewarding, it can propel a country to greater heights. The creative possibilities from committed and motivated teachers are endless. They become a catalyst for development in many sectors. Malawi still awaits a president who will have a profound understanding of how an empowered and highly educated cadre of teachers, particularly at primary and secondary level, as well as at tertiary, can transform the nation. Will Professor Peter Mutharika be that president?

Note: A version of this article appeared in the April-May issue of The Business Journal (Malawi), published by The Student Media Group. I would like to thank Mike Chipalasa and Cuthbert Kachale for feedback that has resulted in updates to the article.