DHRMD,<sup>6</sup> provides another record of teacher placements. DEMs also maintain their own records, called staff returns, updated monthly, to obtain a more up-to-date picture of where teachers are in the system.

We obtained EMIS and payroll databases directly from MoEST and DHRMD. To obtain staff returns, DEMs were asked to provide details of all qualified teachers in their districts, their school, seniority grade, gender, and other basic identifiers. Schools could be linked to the EMIS data for comparison using a unique school identifier code. Teachers could be linked to the payroll database using a unique ID number.

Comparison of these multiple databases confirmed the existence of severe problems of fragmentation and inconsistency in teacher management adminstrative data in Malawi. Sixteen percent of teachers in EMIS 2016 are missing the personal ID to connect them to the payroll database, while a further 8 percent of teachers are listed with an ID that is attached to more than one record. More than 10 percent of teachers in the initial collated staff returns database were listed in different schools or districts than in EMIS. A significant number of teachers are listed by the payroll database as being based in different districts to their actual location as reflected in the staff returns; this reflects a tendency for teachers to be added to or maintained on the payroll database according to the availability of grade-appropriate positions, even if their actual posting is in another district.

The district staff returns, updated monthly, provide the most accurate and up-to-date record of teacher postings. Employing these records as a starting point, it took the authors two years to validate the whereabouts of every teacher in Malawi with the DEMs to create a curated list of teacher IDs and School IDs that could be linked back to the EMIS and payroll databases. First, lists received from different districts were compared and duplicate teachers identified; over 600 teachers were found to be listed more than once, either in multiple different districts or in some cases at different schools within the same district. Queries were sent back to DEM offices for verification, with DEMIS officers in some cases contacting teachers by phone to confirm their actual work posting.

Within the EMIS database, more than 4,000 duplicate teachers were removed. Finally, more than 1,900 teachers in the staff returns database were matched to more than one record in the payroll database owing to a miscoded ID in the staff returns data. These were addressed through manual matching of records by name and school.

Per the finalized database, there are a total of 61,507 teachers in primary schools in May 2017.<sup>7</sup> In the HR employee database there are 61,833 teachers; by contrast, the EMIS database includes 57,850 teachers with the same exclusions. In part, this reflects a time lag, as the EMIS, last updated in 2016, does not reflect the addition of around 8,000 new IPTE and ODL graduate teachers to the system last year.

> 6 Since January 2017, teacher payroll has been in the process of being decentralized and managed by DEM offices; however, a central record of teacher payroll is still maintained to govern releases of finance to districts for teacher salary payments.

> 7 This excludes temporary, volunteer and trainee teachers.

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