Disclaimer: The contents of this blog are my own and do not represent the views or opinions of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

In 1994, Kamuzu was ousted out the government, Bakili Muluzi was elected president, and attempted to have Kamuzu arrested for murder during his administration. Kamuzu died not long after, unable to see the radical changes his country was about to make.

As with many countries following the end of the Cold War, Malawi began to implement many democratic programs. And it did so full throttle. Perhaps the most impactful thing it did was implement FPE—Free Primary Education for all. Not only was this a drastic change, it was a sudden one, complicated by problems that in hindsight, many Malawians say should have been obvious.

The main issue being that if you suddenly make education free in a largely uneducated country, there are not enough educated people to teach the uneducated. Before FPE, only a small sliver of Malawi’s population had access to education. That suddenly changed to 100% overnight, and the initial small sliver was now tasked with teaching the rest of the country (enrollment more than tripled, from about 1.6 million to over 3 million). There simply weren’t enough of them. The government began hiring unqualified teachers or teachers with minimal qualifications to fill the gaps.

Then there was the problem of space. Once again, when the small sliver jumps to everyone, you have to accommodate them all. But because the change was so sudden, very few new primary schools were built. Schools were faced with overcrowding, poor infrastructure, or sometimes no infrastructure at all.

When I first came to my new site, I was shown around the nearby primary school. Most of the students were sitting on the floor rather than on desks or benches, especially in lower grades. The Head Teacher was embarrassed to show me the Standard 3 classroom (3rd grade), but did so anyway. The roof had completely blown off of it. The concrete on the sides of the classroom was crumbling and the tops of the walls were uneven. It had been this way for months. This is 24 years after the introduction of FPE. She said they weren’t using that classroom for now, but she worried aloud that if enrollment kept increasing and they weren’t able to fix it, she wasn’t sure what she would do.

That’s the third and most enduring problem—money. Teacher strikes are common here. The government often fails to pay teachers or fails to pay them what they were promised. This is true of both secondary and primary school teachers (although secondary school is not free, the government does still pay teacher salaries). Whether it is due to corruption or general lack of funding, what is clear is that Malawi does not have enough money. 90% of the country’s funding comes from donor support rather than GDP. Malawi’s GDP per capita (as of 2017) is $300. This means for every person in the country, the government has about $300. Just for comparison, the current GDP per capita of the United States is $57, 638. The United States is 7th in the world. Malawi is 185th.

When you combine poor infrastructure, lack of funds, and poorly qualified teachers, what you get is overcrowding, corruption, and poor education. Most Malawians I have talked to say that when FPE came, the opportunity for education expanded, but the overall quality of education went down.

I should say that the issue of underqualified teachers has been somewhat addressed and many teachers in primary schools are now qualified. And to become a qualified teacher is something worthy of high praise, because of the difficulty of learning in many schools around the country.

Because of overcrowding, many students are left behind. Teachers teach and students are expected to listen. In recent years, attempts have been made to promote more participatory learning in the classroom. There has also been increased focus on working with students with learning disabilities. But these are recent initiatives. For the better part of 20 years, most students have gone into a classroom, listened to a teacher lecture, and then left. If they failed, they failed. If they didn’t, they didn’t. It is extremely common for students to repeat grades. Some of the Form 4s at my school (12th grade) are in their early 20s because of how many times they’ve repeated grades. This is particularly true for Standard 8 (8th grade), the last year of primary school, because this is the year that students take the entry exam into secondary school. If they get a good enough score, perhaps they will get a good scholarship to a good secondary school so that they won’t have to pay for what is considered a lesser education at a CDSS (Another reason students repeat Standard 8 is if they don’t get accepted to secondary school. Repeat education is better than nothing).

A CDSS is where I (and all Peace Corps Volunteers teach). Community Day Secondary Schools. These are mostly rural schools, with limited funding and resources, and considered to be second-rate to National or Private Secondary Schools. Once during a teacher workshop, someone came from the Ministry of Education and asked all of the teachers at our school, “Would you want your own children to learn at a CDSS?” They all laughed and nervously shook their heads. The official agreed. “We always want our children to be sent to National Secondary Schools. But we should work hard enough that we would be proud to send our children to the school where we teach, even if it is a CDSS.” The teachers themselves often complain that a CDSS is where “lower performing” students go. I’ve had debates with several teachers on whether this is due to lack of resources or actual capacity to learn, always arguing that it’s the former and not the latter.

Imagine your own elementary education for a moment, the things you did that helped you learn, the reason that today you can read, do math, understand things, critically evaluate situations—the reasons you can do everything you’re doing right now while reading this.

Now imagine you had a different sort of childhood. In 1st grade, you were one of 80 students in a single classroom. There weren’t enough desks for everyone, so you sat on the concrete floor most days. You wanted to ask questions sometimes, but the teacher continued talking without giving time for any (if you’re a girl, this can be worse—girls are often taught to be silent and are more reticent to speak, especially to males, which the majority of teachers are). You are taught a foreign language starting in first grade. But that foreign language isn’t taught in your own language. It’s taught in the foreign language itself. You do not understand many things about this language, but you cannot ask questions about it because the teacher has been told not to discuss this foreign language in your own language. In 5th grade, all of your classes are now in this foreign language. You understand a few words, but not enough to have a real conversation with anyone. There are books that may help you, but the teacher has only one book for all 80 of you and you can’t take it home. At home, when you do want to study, you often can’t because you have many chores to do like drawing water, cooking, or helping your parents in the field. When you finish your chores, the sun has gone down and there is no light to read or study by. By the time you take the entrance exam for secondary school, you do just well enough that you are selected to a CDSS. Now your classes may be smaller, but the lack of books persist. It is possible you worry, that you will get to form 4 without understanding much of what you are learning.

And this happens. Students go all the way to Form 4, take the MSCE (the national exam at the end of secondary school) and fail, because they didn’t actually understand much throughout all of secondary school, but they either couldn’t or wouldn’t get help. I have Form 2s (10th grade) who do not know the difference between us and are, even though they have been studying English for 10 years. There are Form 4s who did not understand me when I told them in English, “Explain this.” I feel myself becoming indignant when some teachers blame this on students being lazy (by far the minority—most of them understand the structural problems here). It was in conversation with one of these teachers who said, “You will find that the quality of our students is a bit lower when compared to National Secondary Schools.” A bit flustered, I replied, “It’s because they don’t have books. All their classes are in English but they can’t practice English at home. If every student had a Chichewa-English dictionary, you would see a change.”

And I realized as soon as I said it that actually, that wasn’t a bad idea, and I had the power to make that happen. If every student had a dictionary and an English workbook, they would have the power to teach themselves. Students here are often learning in spite of, not because of, the education system. What if they had all the resources they needed to choose their own destiny rather than having it be chosen for them by whichever teacher they get assigned or whichever secondary school they get sent to? I could write a grant for that to happen.

We are in the middle of attempting to pull this off and I’m excited about it. It won’t be implemented until next year, but I’m excited to see what happens. I can’t imagine learning Spanish in high school without a Spanish-English dictionary. Much less learning every single subject in Spanish without one. It’s a requirement in almost every foreign language class to have one. But Malawian students don’t.

Students in both primary and secondary often don’t like to read. Sometimes this is because reading is promoted in English and reading in English is difficult, especially if you don’t know many of the words, or if you have to read with 10 other students because there aren’t enough books for you to take one home. It’s also because traditionally and culturally, oral tradition is more important. In the past the “agogo” (grandmother or grandfather) would sit around the fire and tell “nthano” (folk tales, fables), and this would be a favorite pastime of the children. These folk tales were passed down for generations. The Malawian music I listen to sometimes mentions this:

Chichewa:
Nkhondo
Siimanga mudzi
Adatero agogo
Kadakhala kanyama
Kanyama ka ku tchire
Kadasangalala
Kusiyana kukhala
Munthu wanzeru
Koma moyo wake wonse
Kungokalira nkhondo

English:
War,
Doesn’t build a village
That’s how Agogo put it
There was once a small animal
A small animal of the jungle
It was happy
But there was a very different way of life
A wise man
But he spent all of his life
Just making war
—“Nkhondo,” Essau Mwamwaya And The Very Best

Oh how I wish that things would still remain the same
Live happy and free like the birds in the skies
Come home to the love of grandma and the lovely food
Oh how I miss the beauty of that fire in the night
And the different stories that she told from the heart
In the evenings we would gather by the fire and listen to her
Everyday I would light the fire and tell Ananyuni,
“Musanagone [Before you go to sleep]
Mundiuze nthano [Tell me a story]”
—Musanagone, Lawi

In Form 4, part of the required literature for Chichewa is actually a collection of the written versions of many of these stories. So an attempt is being made to relate the oral tradition back to literature. Discussion of oral tradition is actually a requirement in the literature syllabus for each form. What is undeniable is that reading and literacy can have an incredible effect on anyone’s future. In 1997, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said, “Literacy is the bridge from literacy to hope.” And that’s true. Literacy changes everything. Here’s more of what he said:

“Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories.
Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right.

The illiteracy rate, estimated 45 per cent 50 years ago, has fallen to 23 per cent today, despite rising world population. Between 1970 and 1995, the adult illiteracy rate in developing countries was reduced by nearly half — from 57 per cent to 30 per cent, with the fastest decline occurring in the Arab States.
But let us also remember that there exists a significant backlog of deprivation. The developing world has more than 840 million illiterate adults, 64 per cent of them women. Even in industrial countries, which have nearly universal education and close to 100 per cent literacy, more than 15 per cent of secondary-school-age children are not enrolled in school.

So let us meet the challenge of finding the political will, as well as the resources, that are needed to succeed in this important campaign. Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential. These aspirations merit our strongest possible support.”

In Malawi, the literacy rate is about 66%. As I’ve said in other posts, this number is drastically different for men and women for a variety of reasons. For men, the literacy rate is 73% while for women it is 59%. The district with the lowest literacy rate is in the south (Thyolo, with estimates of about 30% literacy). The district with the highest literacy rate is in the north (Rumphi, with about 83% literacy—a higher rate than many estimates of my home state, Kentucky, which is something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I learned it). Kasungu, where I live, stands somewhere between these two numbers, somewhat typifying the national average. So, aside from getting dictionaries, what’s another way that we can try to promote reading culture, and get students excited and able to read?

A reading buddies program! We had our first meeting this week. 10 students from the secondary school (the top 5 form 4 and top 5 form 3 students in English) walked to the nearby primary school and read books with primary students. We chose groups of 5 students from standard 2 up to 6, so we had about 50 primary students we were working with. Each group worked with a short children’s book (I was able to find several in Lilongwe), about half in Chichewa and half in English. We’re planning to go once a week and work with them for about an hour. I’m excited for this because it helps not only the primary students, but also the secondary students, practice their reading, as well as get experience working with students, since several of them would like to be teachers in the future.

A few months earlier, across the country, volunteers held “DEAR Day” activities. DEAR stands for Drop Everything And Read. We did activities promoting literacy around the community. At my school, we held a spelling bee (the first ever), and reorganized the library, adding a pleasure reading section and promoting students checking out these books. Because there are so few books, with other books students are only allowed to check out a book for a day at a time. We wanted that to be different with pleasure reading. They can check them out for a week.

We take the culture of reading we have for granted. We often don’t realize or think about the profound impact that being able to read from a young age has had on our lives. the So let me close out with a little jingle from a song I knew as a kid:

Butterfly in the sky
I can go twice as high
Take a look
It’s in a book
A reading rainbow

I can go anywhere
Friends to know
And ways to grow
A reading rainbow

I can be anything
Take a look
It’s in a book
A reading rainbow
Reading rainbow