Girls still dropping out from school

"Girls opt for early marriages. As a poor country, Malawi is experiencing a great deal of girls who drop out from school because they are enticed by men to marry or because they get pregnant," Kuthemba Mwale, Director for Education, Planning, Policy and Budget, told IRIN. He said Malawi had a drop-out rate of 18 percent in its primary schools - one of the highest in the southern African region. The majority of these drop-outs were girls. HIV/AIDS has contributed to the high drop-out rate. "The HIV pandemic has taken away most breadwinners (between the ages of 24 and 49) in most families. Consequently, girls take care of their families more than boys," Mwale said. He told IRIN that when the government declared primary education free in 1994, the number of pupils jumped from about 1.9 million to 3.2 million. The overall ratio of female primary school pupils rose from 30 percent to 47 percent. However, he said: "As I speak today, the ratio of girls to boys in grades one to four is 50-50, but 46 or 47 percent of pupils in grades five to eight are girls." Mwale said the massive increase in pupil numbers from 1994, and the resulting shortage of classrooms, equipment, teachers and materials contributed to high drop-out rates among boys and girls alike. "The conditions in the schools is very, very bad. When we declared free primary education there were not enough teachers, materials, etc. The children are frustrated. There is lots of absenteeism, poor performance and a very high repetition rate," he said. However, while the same number of boys and girls dropped out of school in rural areas, he said, more girls seemed to drop out in the urban areas. Fifteen percent of female pupils in higher primary school (from grades five to eight) dropped out, while 12 percent of boys did the same. "We think the girl child is not always encouraged to walk to school, so most tend to drop out," Mwale told IRIN. Working parents, safety concerns, boredom and poor classroom conditions all contributed to the drop-out rate. But the government has been working to reverse the trend. Part of its strategy has been to work with communities, national non-governmental organisations and international aid bodies to get children, particularly girls, back into primary school classrooms - a difficult task in a country which does not have compulsory school education and where poverty has forced many children to find work. One of the organisations which has made a difference in the education sphere in Malawi is the United States chapter of the Save the Children Fund (SCF). Its Education Programme Manager, Lester Namathaka, told IRIN the organisation was making great strides with its village-based schools programme. From a pilot project involving just eight schools in 1994, 63 schools now operated under the auspices of the SCF-US, he said. More than 20,000 children attend the schools and about 300 teachers - trained and paid by the government - are employed in them. Namathaka said the programme expanded primarily because parents had complained about schooling facilities in rural areas. Their children had to walk up to 13 km each way every day and were opting to drop out instead. "We are talking about rural areas where children had to cross rivers and could not go to schools during the rainy season. Some children dropped out after two weeks, so although education was free, there were still some areas where children could not go to school, like in the remote rural areas," he told IRIN. "Using this information given by parents in regular (government) schools, we followed up the cases and the traditional authorities directed us to areas where children were not in school and where there were travelling dangers," Namathaka added. After meeting parents and other stakeholders, it was agreed that the village-based schools programme would be launched and that the community, SCF-US and the government would have roles to play, he said. It was decided that each school would be rudimentary, with four classrooms and an administrative office. The communities agreed to provide the land, material and labour to build basic classrooms. They also identified people in their communities who could be trained to teach. SCF-US provided expertise and some funding, while the government agreed to train and pay the teachers. Mwale told IRIN the government recruited about 18,000 teachers from 1994 to 1996 and that about 3,000 teachers were being trained each year to ensure that the school curriculum was the same throughout the country and pupils were adequately prepared for high school. To try to attract young girls to school, Namathaka said, the partners made sure that 57 percent of the teachers recruited were women. "The idea was that girls were dropping out from schools, so we wanted more female teachers to be role-models," he told IRIN. While half of the children in lower primary classes at the schools were girls, about 17 out of every 50 girls who entered higher primary school dropped out, he said. While the government has toyed with the idea of making schooling compulsory - one way of ensuring that children go to school - Mwale told IRIN that this alone would not solve the problem. Enforcing the law, widespread poverty and hunger and the HIV/AIDS pandemic would also have to be tackled, he said.