On the 2023 PSLCE and JCE exam results & the coming curriculum review in Malawi

That this year’s Primary School Leaving Certificate Education examination (PSLCE) results in Malawi show improvements from last year is worth commenting on. The overall pass rate has gone up by 4 percent, from 83 percent in 2022, to 87 percent in 2023. The number of students who have passed has also gone up from last year. Last year 216,664 students passed the exam, this year that number is 234,645. This year 7,000 more students sat the exam.

Both girls and boys have improved their pass rates. The girls have improved by 6 percent, from 78 percent last year to 84 percent this year, while the boys have improved by 2 percent, from 88 percent last year to 90 percent this year. However, the pass rate for Special Needs Education students has gone down by 5 percent, from 76 percent last year, to 71 percent this year.

These improvements are remarkable. They show that despite everything that was thrown at the system in the past academic year, from climate crises to health emergencies, to the economic hardship the country is going through, some things in the education system are working well. It is delightful to see girls improving by six percent, and boys reaching the 90 percent pass rate. If the girls can achieve another 6 percent improvement next year, they too will reach the 90 percent pass rate. That would be outstanding. For SNE students, something needs to be done; their results should be going up, not down.

That said, selection to secondary school in Malawi remains a big worry. Only 41 percent of those who have passed have been selected into secondary schools. It has been 59 years since independence, and despite the many secondary schools constructed across the country, we still have very few of them, given the size of our population. Currently there are 250 new secondary schools being constructed and/or expanded, through various projects funded by development partners, and taxpayer money.

But we have a long way to go to reach a 100 percent transition rate, as per the 2030 target. That would require constructing more than the current number of secondary schools by 2030. Statistics from the Ministry of Education show that in 2022, there were 1,610 secondary schools in the country. This number should not be taken literally, because 327 of those schools were categorised as “Open.” Students in the “Open” system use the premises of existing government-run secondary schools, in the afternoon, after their conventional colleagues. They are enrolled and managed through the school’s own arrangement, rather than the government.

If we remove the Open schools, we remain with 1,283 schools that are real and have physical infrastructure of their own. Out of these, in the 2022 academic year, 365 were private, leaving 918 as the number of government-run secondary schools. Out of the 918 government-run secondary schools, 774 were Community Day Secondary Schools (CDSSs), representing 84 percent. What all this means is that even if we had some inexplicable windfall and managed to construct another 1,283 new secondary schools in seven years, we would still not be able to achieve a 100 percent primary school transition rate.

For one thing, a population growth rate of 2.9 percent means that the number of students keeps increasing every year. A pertinent observation that needs to be made is that the secondary school net enrolment is only 16.6 percent, meaning that a whopping 83.4 percent of the country’s 14-17 year olds are not attending secondary school (this week a report by Afrobarometer and the Mastercard Foundation said 66 percent of African youth were now attending secondary school). We would need to construct a far bigger number of secondary schools to accommodate the anticipated growth in enrolment.

The number of learners who sat the 2023 PSLCE examination is just one quarter of the number that enrolled in Standard One, eight years ago. In the 2015/2016 school year, there were an estimated 1.1 million learners in the country’s Standard One classrooms. New entrants numbered around 800,000, and another 300,000 were repeating. Eight years later, only 267,330 learners made it to Standard 8 and sat the exam. There is a reason to believe that completion and survival rates will gradually improve. We should therefore anticipate far greater numbers of learners who complete primary school, and will be looking for secondary school spaces.

We could try adopting a double shift system, currently utilised by only 4 percent of secondary schools, but the quality of the education offered would be hugely compromised. We already have the evidence for this. The gap between internal, external and ODeL students in this year’s Junior Certificate of Education (JCE) examination results is alarming. Whereas internal candidates passed at a rate of 85.5 percent, the pass rate for external candidates is 53.8 percent. That is a 31-percentage difference. It is worse for Open Distance and eLearning students, whose pass rate is 47 percent, a 38 percent gap with internal students. These differences point to huge inequalities in school conditions and resources available to the different categories of secondary school students.

Considering that in the 59 years since independence, we have managed to construct 1,283 secondary schools, and only 918 are public, Malawi’s hope for expanding secondary education access lies in alternative means of provision. Of particular interest is Open Distance and eLearning. In 2020, the Ministry of Education established two new directorates, namely Open Distance and eLearning (DODeL), and Science, Technology and Innovation (DSTI). Between these two new directorates, the Ministry of Education is developing new strategies to bring new ways of thinking and operating to solve the serious bottlenecks that have hamstrung the country’s education system for decades. That is where there are realistic chances that access to quality secondary school education can be widened, in the 7 years remaining to 2030.

The human capital development imperative to provide secondary and further education to more Malawians is overwhelming. The 2018 Population and Housing Census revealed that only 7.1 percent of Malawian adults have a Malawi School Certificate of Education (MSCE) or its equivalent. Put differently, 92.9 percent of adult Malawians do not have a secondary school qualification. The census also reported that only 2.9 percent of adult Malawians have acquired tertiary education.

As the country’s struggles to make education available to more Malawians, a more poignant question will be on the type of education that should be provided. And this is the right time to be asking this question. The Malawi Institute of Education, the country’s national curriculum centre, is embarking on national consultations as part of a curriculum review for primary, secondary and teacher education. There are a lot of issues that the curriculum review process needs to look at, but the topmost three, in my view, are the Malawi 2063 vision, recent health and climate emergencies, and the role of technology in education.

The Malawi 2063 vision and it’s First Ten Year Implementation Plan (MIP-1) are very important developments, especially the three pillars (agriculture, industrialisation, and urbanisation) and the seven enablers. Each of the seven enablers is crucial and needs to be incorporated into the curriculum, but two of them offer a starting point for the education system, namely mindset change, and human capital development.

The past three years have been characterised by health and climate emergencies, including the Covid-19 pandemic, a cholera outbreak, and devastating cyclones. The education system needs to incorporate content that will prepare young Malawians for emergencies such as these, in order to prevent, manage, and address them. The hope of human capital development and the resultant demographic dividend is that of freeing the mind and unleashing the potential of each individual to contribute to society.

Technology use in education can enable a lot of learning, but it can also cause a lot of harm. We need to weigh the costs and benefits of incorporating advanced technology at every level of the curriculum. The curriculum needs to provide knowledge on the positive and negative effects of technology use in education, so that young Malawians have the knowledge for making the best choices. As the title of the 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report, released in July, 2023, aptly puts it - Technology in Education: A Tool on Whose Terms?

Ultimately, we need to be realistic as to what a curriculum review can do and cannot do. The curriculum process needs to be seen as only part of a very complex educational equation. We can have a great curriculum, but if it is not properly resourced, and if teachers are not adequately educated and motivated, the curriculum can achieve little. The broader social, economic and political milieu goes a long way in determining what a curriculum can achieve for a society.

Malawi needs an education system that prepares students for current challenges, but also for future problems unknown today. Therefore curriculum and pedagogy need to embrace knowledges, skills, attitudes and values that will enable graduates to think critically and creatively, to be innovative, to have uMunthu, to promote peace and wellbeing, and to help propel Malawi towards becoming the inclusively wealthy, industrialised and self-reliant nation we aspire to be.

What the future may hold for Malawi beyond May 20th

The person who wins this week’s election will need to thank Malawians for one thing: our capacity to forgive and give people a second chance. But if the Afrobarometer poll is anything to go by, it will be the weakest mandate a Malawian president has ever had. The Afrobarometer survey showed Peter Mutharika winning by just 27 percent of the vote.

If that turns out to be accurate, it will mean that whoever wins, whether it will be Professor Mutharika as predicted, or Dr. Lazarus Chakwera, or Dr Joyce Banda, or indeed Atupele Muluzi, will have been rejected by more than 70 percent of Malawians. That will be phenomenally unimpressive. It may in fact nullify the idea of Malawians’ capacity to forgive and give a political party a second chance because it will be such a small percentage of voters putting someone into office based on arcane interests.

What is evident is that there are very particular reasons that are driving attraction to particular candidates. Most of us are pinning our hopes and aspirations for the country on a candidate and a party we believe is best able to deliver. What I aim to address in this discussion are those hopes and aspirations, and the Faustian bargain people have to make in choosing a candidate. Many of us will need to draw upon our capacity to forgive or to ignore major blemishes.

I have restricted myself to the national scenario, but my conviction lies in a Pan-Africanist outlook that draws from and contributes to the global social justice agenda. The domestic interpretation of that outlook is a social justice agenda that would reduce the run-away inequality between the majority poor and the wealthy elites. As we mark 50 years of nationhood this year, everyone's thoughts must on what we would like the next fifty years to look like.

Many of the reasons for choosing a candidate and their party go beyond the ethnicity factor which has played a decisive role in some elections, and has been insignificant in others. The key factors range from the desire to achieve genuine structural reform, to hope for what has been termed transformational leadership going into the next fifty years. There are five overriding themes that I think form the core of the agenda.

Malawi: under construction

Foremost is the immediate anger over the cashgate scandal. Then there is the urgency over public sector reform. Third is the significance of the youth demographic that has made parties rethink their choices for presidential candidate and running mate. Fourth on the list is failure to transform agriculture into a formidable economic engine for the country has left Malawians exposed to extreme poverty. And last but not least is the squandered opportunity to harness natural resources and minerals that has revealed the extent to which foreign conglomerates collude with our ruling elites to plunder the country.

Cashgate and the rule of law: Malawians are extremely angry and want the culprits brought to book. They are even angrier with the pace of progress in prosecuting the cases. But cashgate as a mindset is a multi-generational scandal going back to the 1990s and affecting all the governments that have ruled since the onset of multiparty politics in 1994. Cashgate happened as the culmination of a loss of ethical responsibility and adherence to rule of law.  

There is an interesting schizophrenia about wanting cashgate dealt with, and deciding which political party and presidential candidate can best deal with it. There is a good chance the party that wins the election will itself be deeply implicated in an aspect of cashgate or other forms of past fraud and corruption.

The urgency of public sector reform: All the parties and their candidates have demonstrated their knowledge of what has happened to morale in the civil service and performance in the public sector. They have all promised to restructure the civil service, but no party has made clear what practical steps their government will take to prevent previous failures.

Education and the youth demographic: Three of the major parties, the United Democratic Front, the People’s Party and the Democratic Progressive Party have gone out of their way to court the youth vote by putting up a young person as either a presidential candidate or a running mate. There are hundreds of young people running for parliament and for councillor.

The debate has been how to energise the youth and offer them meaningful life chances through a good education and employment. Out of all the ills troubling our education system, the topmost priorities right now should be to increase the numbers of schools at the primary, secondary, teacher training, technical and university levels. Along with that we must attend to the academic and professional quality of teacher education and their remuneration.

It is disheartening that whereas we have over 4 million students in primary school, we have less than 300,000 in secondary school. This means that 3.8 million young people fail to proceed to secondary school every four-year cycle, creating a huge unemployment bottleneck annually.

Agriculture and the economy: Agriculture is a perennial problem. Just a few years ago we were touted as a global example of an African country that had succeeded in registering a food surplus and ending hunger. Today we are back to where we were with more than 1.6 million Malawians facing severe food shortages in 2013, according to the UN. The political will to find lasting solutions has always competed with unsustainable and expensive solutions aimed at winning popular votes rather than solving the problem once and for all.

Natural resources: There is a lot anxiety over the country’s natural resources. The country has been exporting uranium for a few years now but there is nothing in the economy to show for it. There is mounting interest in other minerals and on oil exploration in Lake Malawi, and people are anxious to see how these can benefit the country rather than the foreign companies that are given the contracts in collusion with the ruling elites.

These are but a few of the myriad issues the next government will need to pay serious attention to. But there is one thing I have learned from this campaign season over and above everything else. Everyone running for president and their political parties have in-depth knowledge of what issues the country needs to grapple with. Many of them have brilliant, if not radical ideas that could truly transform the country’s fortunes.

But having the knowledge and brilliant ideas have proved over the years to be insufficient, as was argued by Ephraim Nyondo in his Nation on Sunday column in March. It matters less what the issues are, argued Nyondo. It is the character of the leader we elect that matters more. Malawi needs a leader with integrity, a good temperament, patriotism, dedication and values. I could not agree more. For me the issue of character is best captured in the intellectual capacity of the leader Malawi needs.

Dr Henry Chingaipe observed on Facebook recently that the best leader Malawians want needs to have the combined characteristics of all the candidates put together. The twelve candidates running for president demonstrated knowledge, experience, ideas, eloquence, discipline, transparency, tenacity, boldness, ambition, compassion and even humour.

But no one candidate seems to have all the desirable qualities. Even the candidates themselves observed this during the debates. The one overriding quality the next president will need will be a type of charisma that can inspire Malawians to rise up and be part of the change they want to see. Many of us are stuck in a state of incapacitation. We know what the problems are but the best we can do is complain or ignore, thinking that it is someone else’s responsibility.

Another winding road for the next fifty years?

Each of the parties with a meaningful chance of winning the election has major character flaws, as was observed by Victor Kaonga on Facebook. Voters will have to do a juggling act to decide which qualities to prioritise and which flaws to compromise over. And that is where the propensity to forgive the past or to ignore inconvenient truths will come in, outside ethnic and patronage considerations.

Voters will have to choose between forgiving cashgate and ignoring the absence of a grand vision, or prioritising compassion and charity for the poor. They may have to choose between forgiving arrogance, nepotism, threats of violence and revenge, or prioritising boldness of grand development ideas and past glory.

They may have to choose between forgiving grand corruption and ignoring plunder and the erosion of ethical behaviour, or prioritising youth appeal, charisma and a disciplined campaign. Voters may have to choose between forgiving past political murders and ignoring decades of dictatorship, or prioritising trust in theological pedigree, clarity of purpose, and the most distance from last atrocities.

But over and above the dilemma of compromises will be the question of how power changes an individual. Whoever becomes our next president ought to go into State House with a plan for how to handle the overwhelming corrupting influence that comes with political power.

We have seen the best and brightest minds go into politics full of promise and good will, only to become inebriated with power and hubristic arrogance. How the next president handles this frightening, all-consuming black hole will be pivotal. He or she will need to inspire the creativities energies of Malawians to rise up to this challenge and take the country’s destiny into our hands. That way, Malawians can look forward to the next fifty years with hope, pride and determination.