explanation, non-eligible schools were included, and specific teachers at eligible schools were left out. Furthermore, the list which was prepared was not consistently followed when payments were being issued. There appears to have been significant confusion over the definition adopted: an MoEST report in 2012 found that Ministry officials had inaccurately advised non-eligible schools that all schools in rural districts were included, a looser standard than even that adopted by stakeholders for the scheme.

Teachers in several districts initiated industrial action over their non-receipt of the allowance, and teachers in several districts initiated legal action, leading to further increases in the number of schools eligible. Efforts to remove non-entitled teachers from the scheme were met with considerable resistance. In June 2016, for example, 23 teachers from Balaka district won a legal challenge invalidating their removal from the scheme in 2013, having argued that a _rural_ allowance scheme must include all schools in rural districts. By 2015, 87 percent of schools were eligible for the allowance, encompassing 80 percent of teachers.

Our case study of Nathenje area in Lilongwe Rural East illustrates the extent to which the allowance has become detached from the ground reality. As noted above, the PTRs of the three schools vary significantly, from 49 to 131. However, teachers at all three schools are eligible for the current allowance scheme.

While the proportion of teachers receiving the allowance has grown, the real value of the allowance has diminished. In the original proposal, it was envisioned that the allowance would reward teachers in remote schools with an amount equivalent to half the average teacher’s annual salary, around MWK12,500 per month at that time. In order to reach the larger than expected initial list of teachers, however, the allowance was introduced at just MWK5,000 per month, equivalent to around one-fifth the average teacher’s monthly pay. While the allowance is now MWK10,000 per month, rapid increases in nominal teacher wages, in response to rampant inflation, mean that the nominal value of the allowance has declined to one-seventh average monthly pay. In dollar terms, the value of the allowance has declined from $33 per month to $14.

With such a non-targeted distribution of the allowance, and a severe reduction in the real value owing to severe inflation, the effect of the allowance on staffing appears to be limited: schools eligible for the allowance have an average PTR of 91, versus 85 for schools which are not eligible. At the same time, the additional cost of the allowance, on top of Malawi’s already high proportion of spending on salaries, is substantial. Reform of the rural allowance is now considered a priority by MoEST ( _<u>The Nation</u>_ <u>, 2017).</u> _Open Distance Learning (ODL):_ Initiated in 2010, the ODL scheme was intended to provide a low-cost way to increase teacher numbers by allowing recruits to undergo in-school training combined with distance learning, without the expensive residential one-year training component of IPTE. In contrast to IPTE teachers, who undergo one year’s full-time classroom training and one year’s in-school training, ODL teachers underwent a short three-week introductory training before two-and-a-half years of in-school practice. More than 16,000 teachers completed ODL training between 2010 and 2016, and from 2012-2017 around 40 percent of the new teachers deployed each year have been ODLs.

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