Will the poorest girls benefit from abolishing secondary school fees in Malawi?

• In Event: Minding the gaps: with more sub-Saharan African governments introducing free secondary school education, what barriers persist for marginalized girls?

Proposal

In September 2018, the Government of Malawi announced that secondary school tuition fees would be removed with immediate effect, together with additional fees contributing towards a general purpose fund and textbooks being abolished in January 2019. With Malawian citizens going to the polls in May 2019 to elect their next President, the timing of this announcement – like that of other African countries which have more recently introduced fee-free secondary school policies – seems closely tied to political cycles. Justification for the fee abolition is now also being made based on the education Sustainable Development Goal.

Our paper considers who the main beneficiaries of secondary school fee abolishment are likely to be given the current reality of Malawi’s education system, with a particular focus on the effects by gender and wealth. Drawing on household data and Malawi’s education census data, our analysis suggests that the challenges currently facing the education system are low rates of progression from the lower grades to the upper senior primary grades. Our analysis breaks this out by different groups of disadvantage and finds that the majority of the most disadvantaged – notably poor, rural girls – are unlikely to reach the end of primary school, and so have no chance of gaining access to secondary school.

We will then identify the impact that the introduction of fee-free secondary education is likely to have on equity of public education financing. The analysis considers the extent to which the distribution of resources reaches girls and the poorest in particular.

Lastly, our paper looks at the implications of the fee abolition for equitable financing specifically within the context of Malawi’s secondary school structure. Like many other secondary schooling structures in Africa, Malawi’s government system has a huge disparity between the more elite government Conventional Secondary Schools– which tend to be better resourced – and government Community Day Secondary Schools. Our paper shows, for example, that just 11% of all girls enrolled in public secondary schools attend the more elite boarding schools. While the government has abolished some fees, others will still remain which are considerably higher at these schools. Given the current situation, we anticipate that the poorest girls are likely to continue to be more likely to lack opportunities to reach secondary schools that provide better choices for their future. With no accompanying policy commitment to redress the huge inequities in public resources between Malawi’s two-tiered secondary school system, we propose the policy of of fee-free secondary education is likely to perpetuate the regressive nature of public secondary education expenditure further.

Authors

• Asma Zubairi, Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre, University of Cambridge

• Pauline Rose, University of Cambridge