# **1. Introduction**

Low-income countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, have typically struggled to deploy teachers to schools in remote areas, resulting in large variations in staffing levels between schools (Mulkeen, 2010; Majgaard and Mingat, 2012; Bashir et al., 2018). These variations stem primarily from teachers’ preferences, typically for placements near to towns and larger villages, known as _trading centers_ (Asim at al., 2019). Countries employ a range of rules and procedures to attempt to address these disparities, ranging from administrative policies to legal standards. The impact of these efforts, however, is highly variable. In India for example, maximum school PTRs are legally mandated by the Right to Education Act (2009); however, as of 2013 three provinces had an overall PTR above the legal maximum (Azim Premji, 2014). Teachers employ a range of formal and informal means to apply pressure to obtain desirable postings, and in many countries officials lack adequate incentives to enforce the rules (Cummings et al., 2016; Asim et al., 2019). In some countries, including some provinces of India, elected representatives have formal right of veto over teacher movements which can interfere with efforts to enforce PTR rules (Ramachandran et al., 2018). Additional incentives for teachers to remain in posting in remote areas, such as hardship allowances, are often required in order to achieve rationalization of teacher distributions, such as successfully tried in The Gambia (Pugatch and Schroeder, 2014).

In Malawi, one of the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, inequities in teacher distribution are particularly acute. While the national pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) is 62, 10 percent of schools have a PTR of 93 or more, while a more fortunate 10 percent have a PTR of 36 or lower. These inequities occur between districts and sub-district areas, but primarily occur within a single sub-district area ( _zone_ ): school PTRs within a single zone can vary by a factor of ten or more (Ministry of Education, 2021a).

This inequitable distribution of teachers contributes to Malawi’s poor levels of student retention and progression. More than 5 percent of students drop out in Grade 1,<sup>1</sup> with dropout rates rising to almost 7 percent in upper grades (Malawi Longitudinal School Survey, 2021). Fewer than two-thirds of students entering Grade 1 are still in school by Grade 5. Those students who remain in school frequently repeat grades:<sup>2</sup> more than one-third of Grade 1 students repeat, and repetition rates are above 18 percent in all grades (Ministry of Education, 2021b). Those students who do progress in school nevertheless achieve low learning outcomes: in Grade 2, fewer than 25 percent of students achieve minimum proficiency levels in the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) conducted by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). At Grade 6, fewer than 25 percent of students achieve minimum proficiency levels in the Southern African Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) assessment in Mathematics, placing Malawi near the bottom in the region.

The persistence of this poor distribution of teachers reflects weaknesses in Malawi’s systems of national- and district-level resource allocation. Until recently, the rules governing allocations were excessively broad, requiring only that teachers be sent to schools with a PTR above 60. With more than half of schools above this level, this introduced a high degree of discretion in allocations.<sup>3</sup> Teachers exploit this discretion, using formal and informal channels of influence to resist placements

> 1 Grades are known as Standards in Malawi, but will be referenced as Grades throughout this paper. Grades range from Grade 1-12. Primary Education is from Grade 1-8, and Secondary Education from Grade 9-12.

> 2 Most Malawian schools require students to repeat grades if they fail to pass an end-of-year examination.

> 3 In 2021, 61 percent of public primary schools had a PTR above 60.

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