An ongoing process of decentralization in Malawi means that the structures of education management are in flux. DEMs report officially to District Commissioners, appointed executives at district level, but in practice are frequently engaged on a regular basis with DBE and other MoEST departments. MoEST manages the recruitment and training of teachers, and allocates new teachers each year to districts; however, payment of teacher salaries and payroll management was until December 2016 managed by the Department of Human Resources Management and Development (DHRMD), a sub-Ministry of the Office of the President, which maintains ultimate control of all civil service staff. Since January 2017, responsibility for payment of teachers and management of payroll has been formally decentralized to districts. However, the HR officers within DEM offices, who maintain day-to-day control of payroll, remain employees of DHRMD.

_Recruitment:_ The recruitment of teachers provides an example of overlapping mandates within education. Malawi’s teaching profession has expanded rapidly in recent years as the system strives to keep up with rapidly rising enrollment. The number of qualified primary school teachers increased by 35 percent since 2010 and 2016, from approximately 41,000 to approximately 58,000.<sup>4</sup> The majority of Malawi’s teachers enter the profession through application to the national training program, Initial Primary Teacher Education (IPTE), established in 2005. The IPTE consists of one year’s residential training and one year’s in-school training at specially-selected schools in the neighborhood of a teachers’ training college.

Although teachers who successfully complete IPTE are not officially guaranteed a teaching placement, in practice, the custom has been that all those graduating who seek positions will receive them; therefore, the selection process for training effectively constitutes the primary method through which applicant teachers are selected. For Malawi’s eight public teacher training colleges (TTCs), this process is managed by DTED, while an additional eight private TTCs employ their own procedures. Neither DBE nor local-level education officials therefore play a decisive role in the selection of teachers into the system.

Training <u>places are oversubscribed, with 20,000 applications in 2015 for 3186 training places (Hau & Nampota, 2016). DTED’s application process shortlists applicants based on academic</u> credentials and a fifty-question aptitude test. There is no interview for potential trainees and no formal process through which motivation for teaching, pro-social inclination, or psychological suitability for teaching is assessed. Therefore, there is no process through which teachers are selected who are particularly likely to be willing to endure some hardship to work in rural or remote areas. However, applicants are asked to confirm their willingness to work in rural _districts_ for at least the first five years of deployment. There is some innovation in the private sector: several private TTCs offering the IPTE include an interview in their selection process, and one network of private TTCs, run by the NGO Development from People to People (DAPP), includes a study tour where teachers are posted in a range of rural schools as part of their training program.

_Deployment:_ All successful IPTE and ODL graduates are customarily entitled to appointment to a position in Malawi’s public primary schools. However, following delays in recruitment and a hiring freeze in 2015, graduating trainees typically wait two years before being deployed to

> 4 Estimates drawn from Education Management Information System (EMIS) database. See Section 3 for details of the differing sources of information on teacher numbers.

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