History of Primary and Secondary Education in Malawi
Authors: Sharra Steve , Silver Rachel 
Published: September 2023

The history of Malawian education encompasses both informal modes of teaching and learning, and institutionalized schooling. Malawi as a sociopolitical unit is a relatively recent construct, born out of colonialism and named only upon independence in 1964. A history of education in Malawi is therefore regional, predating the borders of the nation in the 21st century. Viewed this way, Malawian educational history includes precolonial cultural transmission and skills development, missionary and colonial-era schooling, the postindependence Kamuzu Banda years, multiparty democratization and free primary education (FPE), and a contemporary climate characterized by stubborn inequities. Throughout each period, curricular content, teacher roles, local community engagement, and stances on gender equity or inclusion have shifted to reflect the broader political-economic context.

Robert Laws of the Free Church of Scotland opened the first missionary school in Malawi in 1875. Over the next forty-eight years, missionaries from diverse denominations sought to evangelize locals and serve the project of colonial domination through schooling. With partial, and increasing, subsidization from the state beginning in 1907, these schools trained mostly boys and men to staff colonial bureaucracies. At the same time, they inculcated in them, and in some women, knowledge that would later inform the movement for political independence.

After independence in 1964, educational policy shifted to reflect the political priorities of Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda and his one-party state. Banda sought to restore a Chewa identity to prominence, while expanding school access to staff an Africanized civil service. Prior to independence, Malawi only had three thousand seats at secondary school. Banda built Malawi’s first university and incrementally expanded access across other levels.

The advent of multiparty democracy in 1994 came with a promise to immediately democratize school access, with FPE a policy priority of the new government of Bakili Muluzi. While in alignment with global platforms such as the Education for All Movement, the push to universalize schooling was hampered by international funder conditionalities that tightened public spending in and outside of the education sector and by HIV/AIDS. Broadened access at the primary level was met by declining quality and resourcing. In 2004, access to secondary schooling expanded through policies of decentralized educational governance.

By 2023, these and other efforts had increased access across levels, with gender parity achieved in primary schooling. Yet rates of retention, transition, and performance remain deeply uneven along lines of gender, class, and rurality. Over time, the exclusivist goals of schooling have come in tension with a push to universalize access, while curricular content and pedagogical practices remain aligned with global school culture, to the exclusion of Malawian heritage knowledge. Twenty-first-century schooling in Malawi thus demands reconsideration of education’s purposes to reflect local, indigenous, and heritage knowledge, and other decolonizing epistemologies.