‘We have teachers’ houses but we don’t have teachers’
Willy Pichesi was born and bred in Makanjira in Mangochi. He is lucky to have been among the few privileged people who attended their primary school in the area and proceeded to secondary school despite challenges which characterised his childhood days in their area.
After completing secondary school, Pichesi, who is now 51 years old, picked a teaching job. He chose to be posted to Makanjira because by that time, he says, he was interested in assisting people based in rural areas for them to attain education just like he did.
Through hard work, determination and passion for his job, Pichesi rose through the ranks in the education systems. He is now Primary Education Advisor (Pea) for Lulanga Education Zone, which is within Makanjira, a community township located 101 kilometres north of Mangochi boma.
To Pichesi, being a Pea has been so challenging as he has to deal with issues some of whose solutions lie beyond his reach.
He feels pity for people in his area who admire him for being a Pea. They don’t understand that he considers himself as a captain going to the battle front without the required ammunition and soldiers, yet he is expected to overcome a strong opposition.
“As a Pea, my job demands that I ensure that education standards within my zone are improving rapidly. However, you can agree with me that unlike in tertiary education, primary school education cannot take place without a teacher and teachers are a biggest challenge in my zone,” says Pichesi.
He reveals that out of the required 112 teachers for nine primary schools in the zone, there are only 47 teachers that are reporting for duty.
He says his area has been starved of teachers for a long time such that the available few are overworked as the numbers of pupils continue to rise.
Most schools which are located in rural areas across the country face serious shortages of structures such as teachers houses, classroom blocks and quality water for booth teachers and pupils. These challenges have in most cases been preventing teaching staff from picking up posting in rural areas.
But surprisingly, most schools in Lulanga Education Zone are well supported by World Vision Malawi and other organisations in terms of infrastructure. The schools have piped water, modern staff houses and in some cases, solar electricity.
A visit to some schools such as Mtondo Primary School yields a sorry sight of decent teachers’ houses that are unoccupied and according to the Pichesi, the situation is common in most schools within the zone.
“Our area is lucky because we have been receiving support from World Vision Malawi (WVM) for a long time. In the immediate past, WVM has managed to rehabilitate old school blocks as well as constructing new schools to reduce distance which pupils travel in between schools. But our challenged has been teachers to be teaching in the schools,” he adds.
Pichesi says when they present the situation to the District Education Manager (Dem), what they get are indications than their problem is larger than the Dem’s office itself.
“We have come to conclude that the Dem is not responsible for the problem of shortage of teachers in our zone because during the last academic year, we were allocated 18 teachers, but only six of them reported for duty. The rest refused to come after noticing that the schools are located in remote areas,” he complains.
This, according to Pichesi, is negatively affecting the performance of pupils in schools such that in the past five years, the pass rate in the Primary School Leaving Certificate examinations has been decreasing from 70 to 58 per cent as of last academic calendar.
“There are a lot of interventions aimed at increasing children’s attendance and retention, but when pupils go to school they find that there are no teachers to teach them.
“They are kept for a long time waiting for another teacher to finish teaching another class before attending to them. This in one way of increasing school dropout,” Pichesi says.
Mangochi District Education Manager (Dem) Sam Kalanda says the issue of teachers posting is also beyond his jurisdiction.
He says when the Ministry of Education allocates teachers for his district, he posts them according to the human resource requirements of the district.
“But what usually happens is that when the teachers see that the place is in remote area, they go back to the head office and negotiate to be posted elsewhere. And because that is done at the highest level, there is nothing my office can do about it. We just try to make use of the available teachers but the situation is indeed frustrating, to say the least,” says Kalanda.
The frustration of going to school and coming back without meeting a teacher can easily be noticed on the face of Charles Matemba, a Standard 6 pupil at Mtondo Primary school.
This is one of the schools where World Vision Malawi constructed teachers’ houses, modern toilets and provided piped water.
Charles, like many other pupils within Makanjira, says in the absence of teachers, he finds school boring such that he goes to school only because his parents insist that he should be in school.
“When we are at school we spend a lot of time playing because teachers are not available. Some of my friends return home after the first break time,” says Charles.
Charles says there has been renewed interest by children in the area to go to school due to improved amenities such as piped water and toilets which have been constructed in schools in his area.
Mangochi is ranked among the districts which are struggling to improve their literacy levels in the country.
According to information from the Dem’s office, the district’s literacy rate is at 53 per cent and that only 16 per cent of children complete primary school.
Currently the district, with the help of other partners in the education sector, is implementing various programmes aimed at improving the completion rate from 16 per cent to 50 per cent in the next three academic calendars.
The importance of education to both a human being and a country cannot be overemphasised.
This is particularly so for females, who constitute more than half of Malawi population. It is said that educated mothers are more than twice as likely to send their own children to school as uneducated mothers.
At the same time, researches have shown that a child born to a literate mother is 50 percent more likely to survive past the age of five years, thereby reducing the child mortality rate which currently stands at 17 percent in Malawi.
Further, scholars argue that girls with a minimum of seven years of education will marry an average of 4 years later and are likely to have an average of 2.2 fewer children compared to uneducated mothers. This effectively has a positive impact on the social and economic indicators of a country.
Commenting on the concern that some teachers are refusing to be stationed in rural schools, spokesperson for the Ministry of Education, Rebecca Phwitiko, says according to Section 5, Subsection 2 of the Public Service Act, posting is dependent on availability of vacant posts such that nobody is supposed to refuse posting.
“So the issue of distance or location does not arise because public services such as education are provided to all citizens whether in urban or rural areas and [since] much of the population is in the rural areas, qualified teachers are required there just as they are required in the urban schools,” she says.
Phwitiko reveals that currently the national average ratio for teacher to pupil stands at 1:75 against the recommended ratio of one teacher to 60 pupils in primary schools.
She however reveals that government is expected to recruit 20, 000 teachers in the next two years to add to the available 60, 000 in order to among others improve the teacher to pupil ratio.
Apparently, recruitment of teachers is one thing. Having the teachers work in the schools they are posted to is another. If that is not checked, government will keep recruiting teachers while places like Makanjira, where children are hungry for education, remain starved of the personnel to translate the government’s education dreams.
The implications of this trend are too huge to ignore.
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