Malawi

The government of Malawi should increase efforts to end widespread child and forced marriage, or risk worsening poverty, illiteracy, and preventable maternal deaths in the country.
According to government statistics, half of the girls in Malawi will be married by their 18th birthday, with some as young as age 9 or 10 being forced to marry. Malawi faces many economic challenges, but the rights of girls and women, including the right to education, should not be sacrificed as a result.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) restrictions on recurrent government spending are working against the MDGs, and Education for All, this report argues. Through research with the governments of Malawi, Mozambique and Sierra Leone, this study shows that IMF-imposed macroeconomic policies and explicit caps on teachers’ wage bills have forced many poor countries to freeze or curtail teacher recruitment, and are a major factor behind the chronic and severe shortage of teachers.

This report explores a range of innovative education budget work initiatives from Bangladesh, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi and Uganda, where civil society has monitored and challenged their governments over education expenditure in order to hold themaccountable for commitments to EFA and the MDGs.

Abolishing School Fees in Africa is the product of a SFAI workshop, “School Fee Abolition: Building on What We Know and Defining Sustained Support,” held in Kenya in 2006. The book begins with a comparative overview of the processes, challenges, and lessons learned by five countries that had already abolished school fees: Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, and Mozambique. The subsequent chapters delineate the actual experiences of each of the countries in planning and implementing their policies.

This country factsheet on Malawi intends to assist practitioners to identify the key national policies relevant to the right to education, analyse their strengths and weaknesses and detect the gaps between policies and practice, in order to use the empirical data collected to define a human rights advocacy strategy.