ON THE NATIONAL CHARCOAL STRATEGY

In 2017, Malawi launched the National Charcoal Strategy(NCS) to deal with the worsening problem of deforestation. This strategy is particularly important to Malawi, a country where the rate of forest loss is alarmingly ranked the highest in Southern Africa.

The NCS complements a number of existing national conservation policy documents, some of which include the National Forest Landscape Restoration (NFLR) strategy, the Forestry Policy (2016), the Forestry Act (1997), the Energy Policy (2003), the draft National Energy Policy (2016), the Energy Act (2004), and the Climate Change Policy (2016). As a nation, we surely have a rich policy and regulatory framework for the management of our natural resources.

The fact that predation on our natural resources, forests, in particular, has thrived under the watch of such a rich regulatory environment exposes serious shortcomings in the overall national conservation strategy. We witnessed the mowing down of the Chikangawa Plantation under a very explicit regulatory framework guiding procedure for sustainable harvesting of trees in the forest. By comparison, however, in some other sectors, Malawi has produced internationally recognized achievements by successfully implementing locally developed policies and regulatory guidelines. This signifies that there is great potential within us as a nation.

As we aspire to make gains with the NCS, some serious reforms are needed in its implementation approach. We have to derail from the path that made some of the previous and existing policies and regulations fail to prevent the current status of things. This strategy spells out an excellent vision that, if well executed, will lead to the neutralization of the threat that charcoal poses to the nation. If we fail to decisively deal with the charcoal problem now as has been the case in the past decade, Malawi will be heading for an environmental catastrophe that will be even more difficult and expensive to reverse.

Involvement of the grass-root rural people is one aspect that needs to be seriously reflected upon. These are the people who matter most because they live side by side with the forests the NCS seeks to protect. This aspect has not been fully addressed by some of the policy and regulatory documents in the past. It is very common for some of these documents to reach the point of expiry without the majority of Malawians knowing their contents. This creates a gap that limits public participation during the implementation of the stipulates of such documents. For instance, how readily available are these conservation regulatory documents at local or district level? Even if they can be available, are they in a form that can be easily digested by the local user who we expect to participate fully in the documents’ implementation? If the answer is NO, then there is some issue we need to resolve. The public cannot participate voluntarily if they are not well-informed. The militarized forest conservation approach we have resorted to is a clear sign of national underperformance on the conservation front. Besides being unsustainable, the effectiveness of this approach has been doubted by many on the grounds that it does not guarantee full respect for human rights. Successful conservation hinges upon both long-term interventions as well as voluntary community participation.

With this in mind, the authorities need to find means of getting the vision stipulated in the NCS down to the grass-root populace. All critical stakeholders in the charcoal value chain such as charcoal makers, sellers, consumers, and transporters need to know and be reached with information. This could be achieved, for example, through reproductions of the NCS in form of translations, artistic visualizations, media commentaries, multilingual portable pocketbooks, digital representations, and indeed any form that could help the people who are far from the “offices” access government’s fresh commitments on dealing with the charcoal problem. The school system is also a vital avenue for information dissemination. This, as we can see, calls for wider participation of linguists, artists, publishers, media personnel, teachers, designers and many other stakeholders who, on the surface, may look peripheral and insignificant to national conservation programming.  But as has been seen, their significance in localizing the original copy of the NCS for it to reach the wider society cannot be overemphasized.

SKILL DEVELOPMENT IN MALAWI: TAKING STOCK OF OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM

The relevance of education in combating unemployment cannot be overemphasized.  Education is a source of skills that youths need in various settings of all sorts of employment. In line with this thinking, government of Malawi has made a number of reforms in the education sector to make it responsive to the employment needs of Malawi youths. For example, the school curriculum currently being implemented in Malawian schools is by design science-based. The idea is that in this world of technology, Malawi needs to produce graduates who are going to use technology to deal with various problems haunting the country thereby creating employment. The promotion of science has been accompanied by a reduction in tertiary education intakes for the humanities. Nalikule College of Education is a case in point. Opened in 2017, the college offers predominantly science programmes. The introduction of Entrepreneurship as one of the courses in education studies at Domasi College of Education also attests to the significance of framing an education that promotes job creation skills among the trainee teachers most of whom are youthful.

Despite making this headway, there still exist some areas that need strengthening. Job creation goes hand in hand with economic development. A booming economy supports job creation. Talking of the economy here in Malawi, we have for long relied on agriculture, tobacco in particular. Examining our education system, it does not take an effort for one to see how tobacco, our ‘gold,’ has been under-incorporated into our education. I cannot confidently cite a University of Malawi programme that specializes in tobacco studies. In primary and secondary school, students merely learn it as the main cash crop of our land. Nowhere in the syllabus will you find comprehensive content directly detailing how tobacco production, marketing, and processing are done yet until recently, learners have been exposed to such details but relating to wheat in Canada, rice in the Ganges Valley and cattle ranching in Argentina. Our education has lost a huge opportunity because our youths lack skills to initiative anything relating to the tobacco value chain. We end up exporting raw tobacco. In doing so, we are essentially exporting thousands of jobs for our youths.

Related to tobacco is our lake, which is estimated to be one third the size of Malawi. I cannot recall any constituent college of the University of Malawi that has a specialized programme offering marine-related studies. Such courses could help the country utilize the lake more creatively. It is not strange to find, in the curriculum, offering details content of geographical resources of other countries. For example, during my time, we could learn about The great lakes of America and Israeli irrigation schemes. Specialized courses and subjects focusing on Lake Malawi would sharpen the minds of the youths into rolling out creative initiatives on and along this lake. Unfortunately, by learning less about what we are blessed with, we end up failing to use them fully to change our country’s misfortunes including youth unemployment. 

CAREER DEVELOPMENT SUPPORT FOR YOUTHS: THE MALAWI SITUATION

In the early days of school life, children are often asked this familiar question: ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ Among the most common answers one expects to hear include ‘I want to be… a doctor, a teacher, a soldier or a lawyer.’ To most children, these are some of the most familiar careers.  This reflects the prevailing practice and mentality in our society that when one grows up, he or she should be employed. Career sayings such as the ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ seem to cement such attitude. It is, perhaps high time we de-emphasized this narrow sense of ‘employment’ in our early career mentorship of our children. That way, our children will purposely begin to accumulate skills that they will use in ‘work for others’ or ‘work for self’ future scenarios.

Developing a career is a long process and it has to begin when children are at a small age. As defined by the Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary (3^rd edition), a career is ‘the job or series of jobs that you do during your working life….’ Defined this way, you do not expect choice of a career to be made when one is already at working age. It means that career development service (CDS) has to be part and parcel of the overall national youth development framework with government playing a central role through strategizing, planning, and resourcing. Malawi’s Gross Domestic Product depends largely on agriculture. It, therefore, makes more sense for the government to help promote skills among its citizens that are going to directly or indirectly make an impact in this important sector of the economy. A robust CDS is, therefore, very crucial if most of our youths are going to be part and parcel of the building of a strong economy in the future.  

On the ground, however, national career development service is in a state of disorganization. A recent survey by the Skills and Technical Education Programme (STEP) found that among others, identified the following gaps: lack of national CDS policy or strategy, lack of national CDS programme, rare, ad-hoc and uncoordinated CDS initiatives by some organizations, and lack of CDS materials. Lack of national CDS coordination means that there is no regulation a thing likely to compromise standards of delivery, monitoring, and evaluation. The cost of this is very high. Many youths don’t have sufficient knowledge about various careers let alone paths to follow towards professions that appropriately align with their soft as well as technical skills. In the end, the majority find themselves in particular careers out of convenience and without a thorough preparatory development process a thing that creates a mismatch between one’s skills and the chosen career. We cannot expect maximum productivity from such a combination. That is why the government has to take a lead in nationalizing CDS and supporting it with an appropriate policy framework.

ON THE POLITICS OF JOB CREATION IN MALAWI

As the clock ticks towards the 2019 elections, job creation has featured more prominently in recent political rhetoric. With national unemployment rates being highest among the youth, political leaders undoubtedly see this as an opportunity to win the youth vote since, demographically, youths form a majority in the country's population.

Promises and counter-promises have been made by politicians. The United Transformation Movement (UTM) for example is known for the ‘one million jobs creation in one year’ promise coupling it with the argument that their youthful presidential candidate, Dr. Saulos Chilima, represents the genuine change of fortunes for youths. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), on the other hand, has unveiled sumptuous programmes aimed at creating jobs for the youths in the 2018/19 financial year. These include a 5-billion-kwacha allocation to youth afforestation programme and a youth internship programme targeting hundreds of graduate youths. Speaking at the sidelines on a youth policy conference recently held in Lilongwe, the Malawi Congress Party (MCP) revealed that it is going to form a youth-centered government once voted into power.

These promises share a number of commonalities. One of them is the recognition that youth unemployment is a vice that must be faced head-on. Another aspect, perhaps owing to the political nature of the promises, is the emphasis on short-term interventions to the problem. The last and most important common issue is that these political promises clearly state that it is the so-called government that will bring solutions to the youth unemployment problem, in essence creating a provider-beneficiary dichotomy.

Missing conspicuously is a sustainable long-term framework for dealing with the problem. When we create one million jobs in one year, what next? When we spend the 5 billion kwacha employing the youths to plant trees in the rainy season and successfully absorb thousands of graduate interns, what next? When a youth-centered government is put in place, what next? If long-term plans are not put in place at the very start, most interventions end up stumbling midway. What Malawian youths need most is some intervention that is going to serve them for long. The current youthful demographics of the population are likely to swell further in the next couple of years making long-term interventions a necessity.

It is, therefore, demanded that those promising to create employment opportunities must unveil clear plans for sustaining what they are saying. Most importantly, in the spirit of participatory democracy, the tendency of creating solutions up there and imposing them down on the youths must be minimized. Youths deserve to take part in the conception process of programmes aimed at dealing with unemployment and other youth problems. Youth must not be pushed to the receiving end of the dichotomy. If this requirement continues to be ignored, Malawi shall forever have an unproductive youth. Allowing youths to lead the way will be a great milestone in dealing with the problem of youth unemployment once and for all.