SECTION 2. COUNTRY STUDY: MALAWI

PHOTO: MAKMENDE MEDIA/ACTIONAID

Background to the Malawian education system

Malawi is one of the world’s poorest countries, ranking 172 out of 189 countries on the 2019 UNDP Human Development Index. 52% of the population of Malawi is considered multi-dimensionally poor, experiencing multiple overlapping deprivations in health, education and standard of living.50

Improving education is one of the priority areas of the Malawi Government’s Growth and Development Strategy (2017-2022), and considered a pre-requisite for socioeconomic development. The Government’s ambition is to improve access to quality primary, secondary and tertiary education through increased infrastructure, better quality teaching, and improved governance and accountability structures.

Since free primary education was introduced in 1994, the education sector has experienced substantial progress in Malawi. Notable improvement has been made in access to basic education, which the Global Partnership for Education notes has continued to improve with an average annual growth rate of 4%.51 However, while access has improved, achieving SDG4 by 2030 will be a challenge, with major concerns over both quality and equity. Overall, as outlined in the Global Education Monitoring report, “the sector faces multidimensional challenges such as inadequate school facilities, high pupil-teacher ratios, low learning achievement and huge capacity gaps in school inspection and supervision.”52 Very few children in Malawi are learning the basics, and the poor and marginalised tend to drop out before completing primary school, let alone going on to complete lowersecondary.

Against this backdrop, exclusion of the most marginalised is often very high. According to the World Inequality Database on Education, 25% of the poorest quintile completes primary school, versus 75% of the wealthiest. Even fewer (6%) of the poorest children manage to finish lower secondary compared to nearly half (48%) of the wealthiest.53

The challenge of scaling up the SDG4 commitments for Malawi is further complicated by having one of the world’s youngest populations, with 58% under the age of eighteen.54