Sex, Schooling, and the Paradox of Readmission Policy in Malawi

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

I highlight Malawi’s 1993 Readmission Policy, which banned the practice of permanently expelling pregnant girls from school, and its 2016 reform. Readmission Policy serves as a lens through which to investigate why, though young mothers have been allowed to re-enroll for over two decades, very few do; and how key stakeholders understand the relationship between sex, schooling, and society. I argue that the policy reflects a core paradox in girls’ education, tenuously balancing an access-based human rights approach to education with a more broadly conservative approach to youth sexuality in a way that renders it symbolically significant, yet deeply limited in practice.

In my poster presentation, I briefly examine the context of Malawi at the time of my research and review the scope of the country’s “adolescent pregnancy problem.” I then provide an overview of my findings by chapter. Specifically, Chapter Two explores elite government and civil society stakeholders’ debates over how to manage student sexuality through the Readmission Policy reform. These debates are highly moralistic, and I argue that Readmission Policy—versus, for example, the provision of contraception for youth or the legalization of abortion—has gained traction as the most acceptable intervention in adolescent pregnancy because it works as a form of consensus for diverse, mostly conservative, interest groups. Yet it fails to address the gendered relationships that form the core of adolescent pregnancy in practice, and ignores the structural issues that bar girls from actually returning to school. Chapter Three highlights these structural issues, painting a portrait of life, schooling, and sexuality in Malawi in 2016, when the country was in the midst of a food crisis. I consider why girls’ education continues to be prioritized in development agendas in the face of—and often instead of— concern over the disappearance of livelihood options due to land scarcity, deforestation, and climate change.

Chapter Four shifts attention from the precarity of lives in Malawi to the precarity of development—as a meta-narrative, as a project, and as a lived experience. I focus on how mid-level development workers negotiate a profoundly inequitable industry and manage their own insecure livelihoods. Chapter Five explores how most actors’ understanding of adolescent girls as socially and reproductively precarious functions in daily life. I reveal how teachers, parents, and community leaders regulate girls’ sexuality at the school-level, and argue that girls must negotiate between the contradictory messages taught at school and in cultural institutions. Finally, in Chapter Six, I focus on how Malawian actors understand futurity in light of present hardship. I highlight discourses of chance and redemption to argue that each offers a framework of meaning through which Malawians make sense of daily challenges while maintaining hope for a brighter future. I theorize that schooling is a symbolic institution in which notions of purity and absolution are played out, in part, to justify the distribution of limited opportunities for girls. I conclude by offering two persistent questions that frame my continuing analysis.

Author

• Rachel Silver, University of Wisconsin - Madison