Malawi's parlous educational system

 

Going by the recent UNESCO report on education (http://www.unesco.org/en/education/efareport/resources/statistics/statistical-tables/), our educational system is a terrible failure and needs urgent and massive overhaul.  Although our school enrolment ratio in the first year is quite high (145%), 22 percent of the pupils drop out. For all grades the dropout ratio is 64.3 percent.  Compare this with 33.7% for Zambia and 18% for Namibia. Only Central African Republic, Mozambique, and Rwanda performed worse than Malawi. All in all only 34 percent complete primary school.  And only 52% of these make the transition to secondary education. Our net enrolment ratio in secondary school is 24% as compared to 37% in Zimbabwe, 42% in Kenya and 55.9 in Botswana. In terms of internal efficiency of the system. While as in 1999 5.8% of the students were repeaters in secondary schools, the number had jumped to 9.4% by 2006.

Tertiary education is scandalous. The entire system of tertiary education enrolled 5000 in 2006 (up from 3000 in 1999). Compare this with 9,000 for Lesotho (population 1.8 million) and 25,000, for Rwanda (population 8.8. million), 33,000 for Mali (population same as Malawi),  13,000 for Namibia (population 2 million). If we take Lesotho as a benchmark, then we ought to at have at least 54,000 students in our tertiary system!

 

These low levels of enrolment at tertiary level eventually show up as poor performance in our secondary and primary schools (lack of qualified teachers) and poor performance of the civil service  due to lack of qualified middle level staff. In any case with these levels of human capital we are unlikely to transform our economy from a raw material producing one to an industrial one.