Overall Impact Factors
Malawi has an adult literacy rate of 65.75% (73% for male and 59% for female) and the percentage of females and males aged 25+ that have some secondary education is as low as 21.1% (16.7% and 25.4%, respectively). These are among the lowest education statistics of sub-Saharan Africa.
Only an educated and skilled population will help Malawi achieve accelerated economic growth and attainment of the socio-economic development goals.
Approximately 90% of girls will start the first grade of primary school, but only 40% will start the first grade of secondary school, and only 10% will remain. This is partly due to 50% of girls being married off by the age 18 or earlier, and 35% giving birth by the same age. Only Six Percent of girls graduate from high school each year, with only 2.9% going on to seek post-secondary education studies.
Primary School
Many Factors Contribute to low learning outcomes in primary school, here are a few:
Dropout rate: The dropout rate for primary education has improved significantly from 11.7% in 2009 to 3.2% in 2018. However, retention remains a challenge with primary completion rate at 52% and repetition rate at 24.5%. As a result, this has led to an increase in the out-of-school children population.
Repetition of grades: Over the past 20 years, repetition in Malawi primary school has hovered around 25%, which is by a wide margin above the world's best practices as far as repetition percentages are concerned. High absenteeism by both learners and teachers
Pupil/teacher ratio: The number of qualified teachers in primary schools has increased resulting in improved Pupil Qualified Teacher Ratio (PQTR) from 92:1 in 2009 to 70:1 in 2018 against the target PQTR of 60:1 implying that there is still a shortage of qualified teachers in primary schools.
Textbook/student ratio: Inadequate textbooks with the learner textbook ratio per subject reaching as high as 10:1 in some schools.
Secondary School
Secondary education is recognized as critical for real employment skills development; but it also constitutes a complex level of education, both in terms of adolescent development and also in terms of moving the academic agenda to a more difficult level.
Currently, there is a massive wastage at the end of primary education, where only 38.4% of primary education graduates, who qualified to enroll in secondary schools are absorbed into existing places in public and private secondary schools.
The overall enrollment rate for secondary education in 2018 was 24.8%, meaning that only 387,569 students actually got enrolled while full enrolment would have been 1.5 million youth selected to secondary schools, which is over 4 times what is actually enrolled.
The dropout rate at the secondary education level has been on the rise and it was at 10.9% in 2018 with more girls dropping out compared to boys (13.4 % girls, 8.5% boys)
Plus so many other factors contribute to the low population of attending and graduating learners at the secondary school level.
For the entire country of Malawi, there are only 1,411 secondary schools compared to 6,065 primary schools.