of these community-level actors are aligned, they have the potential to act as a significant voice in contestation around teacher allocation.

There appears, therefore, strong potential to utilize these actors as a channel of influence for communities to strengthen the voice of citizens in the system and provide a balance to the informal influence of teachers through nepotism and cronyism relationships. To achieve this is likely to require greater public awareness of the extent of PTR disparities at the local level: communities at present may see their schools’ high PTRs as symptomatic of the national shortage, not fully realizing the extent to which the overall shortage is exacerbated by relative overstaffing of schools in trading centers. Basic information on school-level PTRs for all schools in a zone, for example, would inform communities of their own school’s relative status in a simple and explicable format.

Efforts to inform and strengthen the voice of community-level actors are likely to increase the influence of communities with well-staffed schools, who could organize to prevent reallocation of teachers away from their schools. However, respondents in discussions did not cite pressure from communities in trading centers as a driver of teacher concentration, identifying teachers’ own preferences as the key factor. Furthermore, given limited availability of classrooms and other constraints, communities may perceive additional teachers beyond a certain point as of little benefit to learning.

The last two decades have seen a proliferation of schemes intended to increase public awareness of public service delivery in areas including health and education, with School Report Cards introduced in countries including the Philippines, Brazil and Ghana. The evidence is mixed of the ability of such interventions to alter outcomes, particularly in political conditions of clientelism or patronage (for a review, see World Bank, 2016b).

However, information which draws particular attention to inequities in input distribution may be more likely to have impact than those which more generally address service quality. Analysis of impact evaluations relating to transparency and citizen engagement in education found that providing information to parents on inputs at school level, along with information on parents’ rights and responsibilities, was more impactful than providing information on school outcomes (Read and Atinc, 2017).

Evidence from other developing countries suggests that increasing awareness of PTR disparities can improve distributions: in the Philippines, for example, PTR disparities were reduced between 2002 and 2004 using a simple, highly public categorization of schools by PTR, with schools with a PTR of below 24 labeled ‘blue’ and those with a PTR over 50 labeled ‘red’. This publiclyavailable categorization proved highly effective at driving better targeting of teacher allocations by giving “marginal schools a voice they previously lacked” (Genito, Roces and Somerset, 2005).

Policy makers and officials within the Government of Malawi and at local level are now aware of the extent of PTR inequities and of the potential for these and other policy innovations to reduce inefficient distribution of teachers. The revised remote school allowance scheme is also expected to move towards implementation in 2018. In addition, the government has recently entered into an agreement with the Global Partnership for Education, a collection of donors, to implement a US$45 million Education Sector Improvement Project. This includes results-based financing incentives for improvement in PTR in eight disadvantaged districts, a measure which is expected 27