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.