Reclaiming the Youth Space: The Next Agenda for Young Malawians

Keynote address given at the Youth Consultative Forum's National Consultative Meeting and Annual General Meeting

6 February, 2014, Crown Hotel, Lilongwe

Youth Consultative Forum annual general meeting
6 Feb 2014, Crown Hotel, Lilongwe

It is interestingly fitting that the Youth Consultative Forum is holding its Annual General Meeting exactly one week after Malawi hosted the BBC Africa Debate at the University of Malawi’s College of Medicine in Blantyre. Is it by design? That debate last week focused everyone’s mind in Malawi and in the BBC’s global listenership on issues of youth and what is being termed the ‘demographic dividend.’ As you may recall, the debate’s question was: ‘Africa’s youth population: opportunity or risk.’

The debate’s moderators, Nomsa Maseko and Nkem Ifejika, opened the debate by asking for a show of hands: how many people in the audience saw Malawi’s youth population as an opportunity? How many people saw it as a risk? A rough count of the hands showed an overwhelming response for the risk part. Many in that audience felt that Malawi’s growing youth population was a risk. I raised my hand for the opportunity part, although as the debate wore on, I modified my thinking and felt that Malawi’s growing youth population could be both a risk and an opportunity.  The difference lay in what policies were enacted, what resources were made available, and how much space young people were able to claim for themselves.

I got a chance to speak towards the end of the debate, and said that the statistics were depressing: Malawi has 4.2 million primary school learners. Out of a population of 14-15 million, that means more than a quarter of our population is in primary school. Now comes the depressing part: from 4.2 million in primary school, we come down to only 260,000 students in secondary school. And it gets worse. Out of 260,000 students in secondary school, we have only 13,000 in the universities, public and private combined. That is 0.4 percent of the appropriate age-cohort. The technical and vocational schools have even less, at 9,000 students.

What these numbers paint is a picture of alarming inequality in Malawi; we have an enormous gap between the rich and the poor. The education sector is both a reflection of this, as well as a catalysing factor of this inequality. Less than half of primary school learners, that is 38 percent, finish primary school. For girls, it is 35 percent. The majority of these are in rural Malawi and among the ranks of the urban poor. The most educated 10 percent of Malawians use 73 percent of the resources available. In the universities, 95 percent of students come from the wealthiest 5 percent of Malawians. Private schools dominate university selection; 80 percent of the university population is from private schools.

It is not surprising why most people in the BBC debate saw Malawi’s growing youth population as a risk. As a country, we have not invested much in the youth. At the debate, the Secretary for Youth was unable to say what the budget for his ministry was. It was both a lighter moment, as well as a serious one. The conclusion most people reached was that the budget for the Ministry of Youth is so small that it would have been an embarrassment to mention it to a global audience.

Now to be fair to the Secretary for Youth, the amount of money and resources allocated to his ministry is not representative on the total amount spent on the youth in the country. There are other amounts spent in other ministries, as well as in other initiatives, that also go to the youth. Ministries such as education, gender, health, trade and industry, and initiatives such as the Malawi Rural Development Fund (MARDEF), the Youth Entrepreneurial Development Fund, allocate money and resources to the youth. As the Secretary told the BBC debate audience, some of the ministry’s funding also goes straight to districts.

As well-meaning as are these efforts and initiatives, the investment in the youth is still very minimal, owing in large part to the small size of our economy. And then there are gargantuan inefficiencies, caused by both capacity problems, as well as politicisation and lopsided prioritisation processes. The net effect of these problems has been a massive loss of self-confidence and paralysing cynicism, understandably so. 

But this is where the youth of Malawi have realised they have to step in. This is where the Youth Consultative Forum is leading the effort to reclaim the youth space. And your work is cut out for you as you strategise on how to “Give Back to Mother Malawi.”

The country needs a different kind of engagement with the youth. The youth of today are different from the youth of the previous generation, yet the mindsets of older Malawians remain unchanged. There is a generation gap manifesting itself in a clash of mindsets. The institutional culture remains stuck in a mindset that treats young people as a tabula rasa, an empty mind that needs filling with adult advice and supervision. Unfortunately, this includes the education system.

Despite curricular changes in the education system aimed at engaging students in a more meaningful and more participatory way, many educators still believe in lecturing to young people and telling them what to do (if I seem to be doing that in this talk, it is for purposes of debate). You can see the results of this disconnect in the system itself. Hardly a week goes by without hearing of students vandalising their own school and disrupting their own learning. In the larger society, the loss of confidence in our institutions has led to an escalation of mob violence and destruction of police stations.

The challenge is for young Malawians to take charge and claim their space in a way that is constructive and forward-thinking. This was reflected in the views expressed at the BBC debate. The most important way of doing is through self-education. And the starting point is familiarisation with current research and policy formulation so as to reclaim your space well-informed and well-prepared.

Your contributions to the problems of unemployment need to be cognisant of the fact that this is one of the biggest global policy issues today. It is therefore important for you to know what the research is saying, both domestically and globally. Your contributions need to focus on how to increase the productivity of the youth. Economists say that the only way for an economy to grow is for more people to be productive. For Malawi, the question is in what ways can young Malawians be economically productive? The answers are not easy, but the type of education available to young people is the key issue.

You have to deal with the national confidence crisis. While it is true that many of us feel hopeless, not everyone is paralysed by the cynicism and hopelessness. There are Malawians, many of them young people, who are doing a lot to make Malawi a better place. It is important to identify these Malawians and celebrate them. This is the best way of inspiring ourselves as a nation and re-injecting national confidence into our society.

You need to engage with the question of what really caused the cashgate crisis, in both its historical context as well as in its current manifestation. And you can not analyse the root causes of cashgate without discussing social and economic inequality, which has reached crisis proportions. If we do not learn lessons from cashgate, and what lies at the root of the problem, we are bound to have more cashgates generation after generation. It does not need to be that way.

You will need to engage in the national discussion on girls’ education, which is now taking centre stage. While the numbers I presented earlier are very bad for most young people, they are worse for girls. And they translate into a bigger gender problem. We are a very sexist society, as is much of the world. Do not jump onto the bandwagon of painting all women with a single brush of paralytic cynicism based on what is said to be the performance of one woman.

Nor should you join those who are making the sweeping statement that in the fifty years we have been independent the country has achieved nothing. That statement is made out of understandable frustration, but if you entertain that thought you are bound to let your sadness about the country’s state of affairs paralyse you into further cynicism and inaction. Paralysis of thought impedes progressive thinking. No doubt the country has not lived up to its potential in the 50 years of independence, but it is you young Malawians who can change that and usher in new thinking and new realities.

Lastly, May 20 is approaching, and there will be a lot of drama. It has been very encouraging to see a lot of young Malawians getting involved in the process. Be mindful of the ever-present danger to get co-opted into orthodox thinking and perpetuating failed practices and beliefs about politics. 

In closing, I would like to thank the YCF executive and secretariat for working very hard to make this annual general meeting a reality. I would also like to thank Action Aid for providing much-needed sponsorship. Special thanks go to all of you who have come today.

I wish you a great time of reflection, strategizing and reclaiming your space.

Thank you very much!

As it Grows, a Baby Crocodile Dips in Many Pools: Envisioning a new Malawi, Starting with the Children

The story of 12 year-old John Sampson was so compelling I decided I would share it with a group of young Malawians I was meeting on Saturday November 17^th. In case you haven’t heard his story, which made headlines around the world last week, let me briefly tell you who this young man is. John Samson is an orphan who is doing Standard 6 (6^th Grade) at Jacaranda School for Orphans, just outside Limbe, in Blantyre. He submitted an entry into the Royal Commonwealth Essay competition, and he won first prize.

The Commonwealth has 54 countries from around the world, and this 12 year-old Std 6 Malawian won first prize, out of 8,500 people who entered. On Wednesday November 14th, John met the Queen of England, at Buckingham Palace, and presented her with a Samsung tablet which has his essay on it. The essay is titled ‘The day I wore my best clothes.’ Judges for the competition, according to Jacaranda School’s website, were The Honourable Lady Jane Roberts, award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Telegraph Deputy Editor Benedict Brogan.

Without giving away the story, which you can read in full here, it is a heartfelt narrative from a young soul dealt a cruel hand by life. Barely out of toddler stage, he lost both his parents, was abandoned by an uncle, and lived by himself. He has since picked up the pieces, all in twelve short years. John was also interviewed on the BBC World Service radio programme ‘Outlook,’ which you can listen to here (starts at 10 minutes in).

I read John’s story to a group of young Malawians, aged between 10 and 20, at an event organized by the Malawi Human Rights Youth Network. The MHRYN had brought the youth together, with funding from Plan Malawi, for them to present issues on which they are looking for stakeholder intervention from the government and civil society. They came from primary and secondary schools, and ten of them were members of the Youth Parliament, drawn from constituencies in Lilongwe. They presented their issues to government representatives from the Ministry of Education, the National Youth Council, the Ministry of Labour, the judiciary, and from civil society.

In their presence was another young Malawian, whose own story I find as gripping as John Samson’s story. The story of 20 year-old Thandikile Jumbe appeared on the front page of The Nation on Friday November 2. When she was young, Thandikile lived in one of the wealthiest suburbs of Lilongwe City. Her parents owned property and businesses, including a filling station and a car hire firm. One day Thandikile’s father died, and her mother soon followed. Her parents had left a will which entrusted all their wealth to their only daughter. For some inexplicable reasons, the will ended up in someone else’s hands, and turned Thandikile’s life upside down. Today Thandikile lives in one of the poorest and most destitute parts of Lilongwe city. She lost everything, and in the process, became a teen mother.

But life did not end there for her. She became actively involved in a Community Based Organization (CBO) looking after little orphans. Today, she is Deputy Speaker of the National Youth Parliament, and is working to make the voice of young people heard in the national assembly. She is hoping to go to college, and to continue working with other orphans at the CBO.

The third story I shared with the young people on Saturday was that of William Kamkwamba. When he was 14 years old and in his first term in secondary school, William dropped out of school. It was in 2002, and Malawi was facing a severe food crisis. His parents used all the money they had to buy food, to keep the family alive. They were unable to pay for his tuition fees. A nearby primary school had a library, which William frequented. One of the books he checked out of the library demonstrated how to make electricity at home, using junk materials such as old bicycle dynamos, tyres, and other materials.

Soon William made a windmill out of the junk materials. He powered his parents’ house and his bedroom. An educationist whose USAID-funded project had brought the library books, Dr. Hartford Mchazime, heard of William’s windmill. He brought a Daily Times reporter, Sangwani Mwafulirwa, who wrote about William. Blogger Soyapi Mumba picked up the story and wrote about it on his blog. The story was picked up by other bloggers outside Malawi, and it became an international sensation.

Today, William is pursuing a degree at Dartmouth College, one of the best universities in the world. He has co-written a memoir of his experiences, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, which became a New York Times best seller. His media appearances talking about his book included the most watched and listened to TV and radio shows in the United States. He has attracted funding for bigger solar projects in his village, and has brought electricity to his former school and the surrounding area.

During the half day meeting on Saturday November 17th, the Lilongwe youth at the meeting presented the problems they face, and the departments they have identified to take their problems to. Issues included overcrowded classrooms, very poor sanitation in schools, inadequate textbooks, predatory teachers, too many children fending for themselves, unemployment, the politicization of youth entrepreneurship loans, among others. Several stakeholders were on hand to respond to the concerns of the youth. They described what their departments and organisations were doing to protect children and the youth, and promote their welfare.

Two police officers, Sgt Gertrude Mwachande and Sub-Inspector Malango Mwasinga described the introduction of the Child Protection Unit of the Malawi Police Service. They said every single police station in the country has this unit, where anyone, including children themselves, can go to alert the police about any abuse being inflicted on a child. Two district education managers (DEMs) were invited, from Lilongwe Urban and Lilongwe Rural West. The DEM for Lilongwe Rural West, Mr. Anderson Ntandika, came in person, while the DEM for Lilongwe Urban was represented by the Primary Education Advisor for Mkukula Zone, Mr. Nelson Kachikuni. Both Mr Ntandika and Mr Kachikuni described the numerous efforts the Ministry of Education is undertaking to improve schooling conditions. They singled out sanitation programmes in schools, continuous professional development training for teachers, and the involvement of communities in supporting schools.

From the Lilongwe District Youth Office came Mrs Alice Mazungwi, while Steven Phiri, Lilongwe District Social Welfare Officer, represented his department. Other stakeholders came from the Labour Office, the Magistrate Court, and Plan Malawi. They outlined initiatives being taken to improve the social welfare of vulnerable children, and to protect from them from abuse, poverty, and destitution.

On their part, young Malawians are taking up their place at the leadership table. In schools where MHRYN is working, they have set up Child Rights Clubs, where they educate one another about their rights and responsibilities. They are learning about the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and what Malawi is doing in fulfillment of the convention. They have formed a youth parliament, and are working towards making their concerns reach the highest levels of legislative power.

During lunch I sat on a table with three boys and one girl. The boys were in Standard 6 and 7, while the girl was in Form 3. They were all from different schools. They described to me what was working and what was not working in their schools. They said they were looking forward to visits from human rights activists to teach them more about human rights, and to encourage membership of their clubs.

As the stories of children like Thandikile, John Samson and William Kamkwamba teach us, young Malawians are no longer just sitting and waiting for the day when they will finally grow up and become leaders. They are claiming their leadership roles right now. They have their own vision for how to make Malawi a better place, something that going by the levels of degeneration and backward development over the past few decades, has eluded generations of Malawian leaders, including the current one. Combined with predatory, extractive capitalism structured to enrich the global North at the expense of the global South, the result has been regressing, rather than improving quality of life for most Malawians and Africans.  

There are many youth groups mushrooming around the country, young people looking for meaningful, active involvement in making Malawi a better place. For the past six months Edward Chileka Banda has been organizing fellow youth and bringing them under one umbrella organization, the Youth Consultative Forum. He is driven by one philosophy: it’s time for the youth to get meaningfully engaged in the development of the country, through volunteering their time. Edward’s zeal and energy has inspired many other young Malawians and civil society leaders who have stood side by side with the YCF to galvanize the synergies of young Malawians.

The question of leadership has dominated the media over the past few weeks. Malawians are beginning to wonder what kind of leadership we have produced over the decades, and are hankering for a new vision. As John Samson, Thandikile Jumbe, William Kamkwamba, Edward Chileka Banda and other young Malawian leaders inspire their fellow youth to envision a different Malawi, two questions will be important: What legacy are we going to leave them? What kind of education is going to prepare them not to repeat the mistakes of past generations, but to build upon and ameliorate what is being bequeathed to them?