Why Malawi’s education sector could be on the cusp of change

On 5^th April, 2022, Minister of Education, Hon. Agnes NyaLonje presented a ministerial statement to Parliament on the status of government projects in the primary and secondary education sub-sectors. The statement paints the grim reality of problems gripping the country’s education system, but it also shows that if we can follow through on current policy plans, strategies, and the national vision, we might be on the cusp of change over the foreseeable future.

It is nothing short of a national scandal, as we have known since the 2018 population and housing census, that 85 percent of 14-17 year-old Malawians are out of school. It is deeply troubling that 62 percent of students who pass the Standard 8 examination have nowhere else to go because our public secondary school capacity accommodates only 38 percent of those who pass. Such is the precarity and fragility of our education and social protection systems that 450,000 primary school learners (8 percent) have dropped out of school since the onset of the covid-19 pandemic. For secondary school students, that number is 37,000 (9 percent).

Before the cyclones between January and March this year, 10 percent of primary school learners were using temporary classrooms, while 25 percent were using open air classrooms. According to the Ministry of Education, the cyclones affected 476 schools in 22 education districts. There is a deficit of 4.4 million desks for both primary and secondary schools. At the primary school level, 75 percent of learners do not have a desk.

There is progress being made, but it is slow. The government has been constructing three teacher training colleges, but four years since construction started, not even one has been completed. Indications are that all three will be completed this year, which will be a great development. The Secondary Education Expansion for Development (SEED) project, which aims to expand or construct 250 secondary schools, started in 2018, and is expected to end in 2023. With one year to go, the project has constructed only 16 new secondary schools, and expanded only 30. Hopefully there will be an extension, owing to the delays this important project has encountered.

There are positive signs on the horizon, however. There are ambitious and forward looking policies and strategies that, if strictly followed and implemented, could lead to tremendous improvements in the system by 2030 and beyond. The MIP-1, the implementation plan for the first 10 years of the Malawi 2063 vision, has made several strategic provisions. By 2025 all primary schools are expected to have an Early Childhood Education program to ensure that every child has access to public pre-school. Currently only 28 percent of our children have access to pre-school, and these are mostly privately owned centres in urban areas. Access to early childhood education will help most children enter primary school well prepared, and succeed.

Currently about 800,000 children enter Standard One every year, and only about 300,000 survive to Standard 8. This explains why 67 percent of Malawians aged 15 and above do not have any school qualification, according to the 2018 population and housing census. There are far more Malawians outside the school system, than those in school, especially those of adolescent and young adult ages. The budget has nothing for them. The MIP-1 provides for community learning centres, which would address this problem.

There are three other really important strategic interventions the government is undertaking. The Ministry of Education is introducing Open, Distance and eLearning across the entire education system. This could unlock access for millions of Malawians who are denied an opportunity for education especially at secondary and tertiary levels. The Ministry is also developing a new science, technology and innovation strategy that, together with the ODeL strategy, could solve major problems of access, quality, research and innovation across the education system.

There is also a National Teacher Policy that aims to transform the teaching profession and make it central to improving the quality of education and enhance human development capabilities. Once launched, the teaching profession may not be the same. At the heart of Malawi 2063 and the MIP-1 are education, knowledges and competencies to deliver on the aspirations both in the short term and in the long term. That is why one of the seven pillars of Malawi 2063 is human capital development, which others prefer to call human capabilities to ward off the exploitative scent of neoliberal thinking. The education system, and teachers in particular, are therefore central to the achievement of the national vision.

So what we really need to do, as a nation, is to make sure we all understand the vision we have set for ourselves. Even more important is to develop a strong implementation mindset to ensure that we follow through on what we have pledged to do. We should put behind us the era of developing brilliant policies and strategies but failing to implement them. The Malawi 2063 and the MIP-1 are brilliant, well thought out documents. But they need to be seen as living documents that can respond to shifting ground. They also require vigilance and determination, especially in the governance and public sector performance areas.

What is most crucial about the new policies and strategies is that they need to aim at growing the economy exponentially, for the country to be able to start financing and implementing the national vision in the mid-term and in the long term. The current education sector investment plan for the period 2020 to 2030 envisages that for 2022, the education sector requires MK1 trillion. The 2022-2023 budget passed in Parliament recently has allocated MK462 billion to the education sector; not even half of what is needed. This is a problem of the national economy and governance systems.

Currently there is about K153 billion ($180 million) from development partners going into the primary education sub-sector, and about K204 billion ($240 million), also from development partners, being spent on the secondary education sub-sector. Development projects in the education sector are still heavily dependent on donor aid, largely due to the size of our economy which is incapable of funding huge infrastructure projects. There is hope that the MIP-1 strategy might help to begin to change things.

The massive corruption and theft that have now become a daily front page routine pose an existential threat to the national vision, but one we can overcome, if we are determined enough.

Thoughts on Malawi at 53: History, Education and Human Dignity

I would like to preface the thoughts below by offering my deepest condolences to the families of the Malawians, many of them reported to be children, who were killed in the stampede at the Bingu National Stadium today on 6^th July. I convey warm thoughts to the injured and extend hope that they will get better soon.

My effort today is an attempt at crystalizing disparate thoughts that I have been pondering for many years, on human dignity. I believe this lies at the core of what we ought to be focusing on as a nation. And I believe the education system, and its origins, are a central narrative to this. In this discussion I provide an overview of what the education statistics looked like at independence, and how, 53 years later, we are yet to seal the chasms created over a hundred years ago. 

Overall, I am concerned with how the adoption of modern education in our country, and the minimal requirements we set for the teaching profession, have meant that huge numbers of Malawians have been stripped of their human dignity.

In 1964, Malawi had just over 3 million people. There were about 360,000 students enrolled in primary school, and about  6,000 secondary school students. Some 1,368 students were in teacher training colleges; 381 in technical and vocational colleges; and 180 in university. These numbers are from the Education Management Information System or, the Education IFMIS (without the cash).

There was no secondary school in Malawi until 1941. That was 66 years after the first primary school, opened in 1875. Not that there was no education system in the land before the missionaries, just that it was not institutionalised the way modern schooling is.

The colonial government opened Blantyre Secondary School in 1941, before opening Dedza Secondary School ten years later, in 1951. Mzuzu Government Secondary School, the third government secondary school, opened in 1959. For the missionaries, their first secondary school opened two years after BSS. This was Zomba Catholic Secondary School, of the Roman Catholic Church, which opened in 1943. For these facts, we are indebted to Kelvin Banda (1982). 

The late establishment of secondary schools meant that secondary school education was a privilege reserved for very few people. At the time of independence in 1964, the gap between primary and secondary school was already very wide. If it were to begin to bridge the gap, secondary school enrolment needed to multiply many times over.

Today, 53 years later, there are about 18 million of us. We have about 5 million primary school students, with girls outnumbering boys by about 6,500. In Standard 1, about 15,000 more girls enrol for school than boys, at least as of 2015. But secondary enrolment still lags very far behind. As of 2015, the most recent official statistics available, we had just about 360,000 secondary school students, with boys outnumbering girls by about 23,000.

In May this year, just over 271,000 students sat the Standard 8 primary school leaving certificate examination. When this class entered primary school in 2009, there were 877,217 of them, according the 2013 EMIS. Only a quarter of that number survived the eight year cycle. More than 600,000 either dropped out, or are repeating.  In 2016, that figure was 255,000, for students who sat the PSLCE. They had survived from 850,000, the number that entered Standard one in 2008. Again, 600,000 students had fallen by the wayside over the eight year cycle. It has been that way for decades. 

Out of the 271,000 who sat the PSLCE a few weeks ago, about 75 percent or so will pass the examination. Government secondary schools will take in about 80,000 students, and private secondary schools will take in about 20,000. Of the remaining 171,000, a few thousands will enter what has become known as open day secondary school. Previously known as “night school,” the open system accepts any student, regardless of age, as long as they have a Standard 8 certificate. They come in the afternoon and learn for three to four hours.

The tertiary and higher education statistics are even bleaker. The last time EMIS data included tertiary and higher education was in 2011. Then, it was reported that the country had 12,203 university students, 6,105 technical and vocational students, and 10,993 students in teacher training colleges across the country. This showed a total of 29,301 students in all of Malawi’s higher and tertiary education institutions as of 2010.

There have been quite a few remarkable gains over the decades. More girls are getting into school, and are outnumbering boys in the Form 1 selection. In 2015, 37 percent of girls who passed were selected to secondary school, against 35 percent for boys, a trend that started in 2013.

Improvements have also been registered in the teacher training programmes. In 2015 the teacher training colleges enrolled more female student teachers (5,890) than males (4,304), a difference of 1,586 in favour of females. The male-female ratio for primary teachers has also improved in the last five years. From 62 percent male teachers against 38 percent female teachers in 2010, male teachers were now down to 58 percent, against 42 percent for female teachers, in 2015.

However these figures change drastically from upper primary into secondary. In a sample of teachers of English in 100 primary schools and 12 CDSSs in Thyolo district, there were 410 male teachers, compared to just 39 females.

In broader terms, the historical inequality in access to education has persisted over the decades. As the 2017 PSLCE numbers show, the majority of Malawian children who enter primary school never finish the eight year cycle, a trend that goes back fifty three years. As the 2016 Malawi Demographic and Health Survey reveals, almost 70 percent of Malawians aged 15 years and above do not have a secondary school education. The numbers are worse for women, at 74 percent.

All these trends, decades in the making, begin to have a knock-on effect on the kind of nation we have become. Perhaps the most significant, yet intangible effect is on the human dignity of ordinary Malawians. The majority, as the numbers show, have not been given the opportunity to access a commodity that came with Western colonisation and replaced traditional forms of being human and the collective respect accorded to individuals.

And this is not peculiar to Malawi. It is a legacy of global colonialism in many parts of the world. As a species, we have not spent enough time and intellectual resources examining this phenomenon and using the school system to deal with its pernicious legacy.

Consequently, it is not of much surprise that as a country we have significantly low levels of civic involvement, economic participation, and political engagement. A recent book, edited by Dan Banik and Blessings Chinsinga argues that Malawi’s political system is at odds with its development goals. The country’s political system and development agenda are pulling in opposite directions. It is a complex phenomenon that requires careful examination, especially as it infiltrates the education system and influences what is taught and learned, and how.

The historical elitism and exclusivity of the education system extends to language, where the primacy of English has become a virtual proxy for academic pedigree and intellectual acumen, pushing endogenous forms of knowledge into oblivion. As a result, a large population of Malawians are kept outside the dominant knowledge production and political governance systems.

It also means the ways of knowing and living that many Malawians utilise on a day to day basis are excluded from educational, political and economic officialdom, creating a form of arrested development. Mwalimu Julius Nyerere referred to this as “the worst of both worlds” (1967). What he meant by that was that modern Africans had abandoned traditional ways of living and knowing, and were no longer excelling in them. Compelled to adopt foreign knowledge and governance systems, they were not excelling in them either. They are thus neither experts in African ways of being, nor in the newly adopted foreign ways.

Our teacher education system is struggling to keep with the demands of a 21^st century education dynamic. Malawian primary school teachers have always received the bare minimum education required, and no more. Although this has been more acute in primary than secondary schools, the majority of secondary schools suffer from the problem of teacher quality as well. In private secondary schools, 72 percent of the teachers were unqualified, in 2015.

Regionally, our neighbours, and much of the world, have moved toward university diplomas and degrees for primary school teachers. In the world’s best education systems, the minimum qualification to teach in primary school is a masters’ degree. We are stuck with the age-old certificate, given after one year of theory and one year of practicals.  There have been efforts to move in the direction the rest of the world is moving, but the size of our economy, coupled with dizzying levels of waste, remain a stumbling block.  

There is an insatiable appetite amongst teachers with a primary teacher's certificate to obtain diplomas and degrees. Because our teacher development system is yet to find a way of handling this, those who obtain higher qualifications are pushed out of primary schools into secondary schools or other jobs outside the teaching profession. It is as if we do not believe that primary schools deserve well educated teachers.

Yet the teacher education policy expresses a clear desire for a highly educated and well prepared cadre of teachers. The National Strategy for Teacher Education and Development (NSTED) 2007-2017 observes that the best primary teachers always shift from primary school to secondary schools. This, the NSTED argues, has “weakened both primary and secondary sub-sectors” and quality both in primary and secondary schools “has been compromised”.

The reason this has been happening is the absence of a mechanism to recognise and reward higher qualifications so teachers who upgrade can stay and continue teaching in primary schools. That would allow our primary school children to be taught by well qualified, highly educated teachers. But a deeper reason is the absence of an education philosophy that recognises the central importance of highly qualified teachers at the earliest stages of the education system.

The origins of this absence of a philosophy of teacher excellence right from the nursery stages go back to the introduction of modern education in Malawi. When the missionaries established the first modern school in Malawi, in 1875, the primary purpose of education was to teach people how to read the Bible and thereby spread Christianity. 

Thus there was rapid expansion of primary schools offering basic education in reading, writing and arithmetic, with a little technical education. Secondary and tertiary education were not available in Malawi; people had to travel to other countries in the region. Thus, secondary and tertiary education are still relatively new in Malawi. This has had an effect on how we have envisioned who can become a teacher. And being a teacher in Malawi brings issues of human dignity to the fore.  

Human dignity is hardly talked about in public discourse, in Malawi or elsewhere. It is not an attractive topic in public policy even at the global level. But that is what more than a century of colonial subjugation and Western epistemological dominance has wrought. What makes it more insidious and therefore hard to comprehend is the English language that I am using to express all this. Being “educated” in today’s world, in this part of the world, means being inextricably bound up with a globally dominant colonial language.

English derives its dominance and sustained support from elites because it accords “educated” people a form of human dignity stripped from the egalitarian norm which tradition placed on every individual. The sense of exclusivity gained from the education system resides in the particular ability to speak a language that bestows global privilege on one and sets one apart from the rest of one’s folk. This explains the extent Malawian elites will go to prove what they believe to be the uselessness of Malawian languages.

No one is disputing the importance of English. That is beyond debate. It is amazing how dichotomous the debate quickly becomes. The dominance of the English language in all of government and commercial business restricts participation to the estimated less than 10 percent of Malawians who are conversant with the English language. We need to think about the remaining 90 percent who do not use English. What Malawi needs, looking ahead, is an active agenda to make translation the centre of knowledge production. Our country needs to make global knowledge available to ordinary Malawians, in their own languages, and to make Malawian knowledge available in global languages.

That would enable transfer of knowledge at a scale that would catalyse self-empowerment, economic growth and socio-economic development.  A two-way transfer of knowledge between global languages and Malawian languages would mean that knowledge of mathematics, science and technology would be available to the majority of Malawians, including the 70 percent who do not have secondary level education. That would change the fortunes of the many Malawians historically denied access to education. Ultimately, it would proffer Malawians the dignity stripped from their humanity by colonial subjugation. That is what would put us on the way toward genuine independence.

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!