The Need to Reframe Literacy To Address The Education Crisis in Malawi
The Education Hub with Benedicto Kondowe
At the National Dialogue on Transforming Malawi’s Education held last month, July 2022, the Minister of Education (MoE) Hon. Agnes NyaLonje delivered a grim assessment to stakeholders and development partners — education is in a crisis whose impacts will mostly manifest 10 to 15 years from now.
Citing recent World Bank data which indicates that 90 per cent of 10-year-olds in Sub-Saharan Africa cannot read and comprehend a simple text or story, the minister stated that students’ poor literacy skills mean their ability to learn has not been developed and that their chances of learning are limited.
To the layperson, perhaps there is yet no sounding alarm. After all, for as long as most Malawians have known, the state of education is always in need of some kind of fix. If it is not high dropout rates due to poverty or pregnancy, then it is the poor compensation of teachers or periodic school closures brought on by everything from protests to the pandemic. More often than not, these and more evergreen obstacles compound upon one another to form an overwhelming force that is educating students in Malawi.
What makes this warning particularly distressing is two-fold: first, as the Minister alluded, poor literacy shall breed a Malawian society in which citizens lack the skills to continue and maintain the nation’s development. The Minister asked — “What kind of leaders will they be? Will we, for instance, be able to have engineers, doctors and teachers among them?” — all pertinent questions that should concern each of us.
Secondly, the education crisis, if not addressed now, will leave young learners unequipped for a digital world. The minister said as much with remarks made during a panel discussion on Bridging The Digital Skills and Human Capacity Development Gaps at the African Internet Governance Forum held in Lilongwe last July 2022. There, the minister stated that ministries of education in Africa must rethink how teaching and learning can be optimised within the education systems to meet digital skills and human capital development.
The importance of doing so cannot be overstated especially when, as the Minister rightly pointed out, digitization in Africa is critical for its nations’ competitiveness on the global stage. She also stated that it is the role of education ministries to create conditions that will produce a digitally literate workforce.
There are indeed some measures in place to begin to address the issue of digital skills development. Speaking at African Internet Governance Forum, the minister cited efforts such as the continual expansion of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT), Computer science and related science programs in higher learning institutions. In addition, Malawi is seeing the development of open distance and e-learning capabilities as well as reviewing curricula for all primary and secondary school graduates to be digitally literate.
However, when the stakes are this great and already pressing, the aforementioned efforts are unfortunately too diminutive in impact for the operationalisation of the digitization agenda to progress speedily — especially in light of the bleak forecast by the minister that the ongoing education crisis’ impact will manifest in as little as a decade.
There is a pressing need to reframe literacy altogether to address the education crisis in Malawi and to prepare learners for the digital era which has already come and yet leaves so many behind. As Heidi Hayes Jacobs once remarked, “Teachers need to integrate technology seamlessly into the curriculum instead of viewing it as an add-on, an afterthought, or an event.”
We, at the EduHub, believe that the future of education hinges on educators’ willingness to trade tradition for tech.
Teachers must be able to proactively integrate modern technology into the classroom, whether online or in-person, to meet students’ changing needs and preferences.
The Malawi education system requires comprehensive re-contextualisation of literacy as not merely a matter of being able to read, understand and write text — it must also inherently apply to the ability to do the aforementioned across a variety of formats (i.e. tactile and digital media). In addition, learners must not only be taught technical digital skills but all facets of existing in a digital world e.g. understanding one’s rights and responsibilities as a digital citizen, evaluating media and information for truth and accuracy as well as managing one’s digital identity.
The foundational years of public education (especially primary) must introduce learners to digital skills and it should be at this level that they must begin utilising digital learning to acquire the said digital skills.
Learners must not have to advance to higher learning institutions to encounter digital learning or to gain skills for the workplace and navigating the digital era.
Jane Bozarth, Director of Research, The e-Learning Guild summed up the digital quandary as follows: “We complain that learners want to be spoon-fed, but then we won’t let them hold the spoon.”
Of course, this is easier said than done. Implementing a digital agenda faces the challenges of lack of dependable access to electricity, the internet and well-trained and supported teachers to teach digital skills. Not to mention that the very availability of affordable devices with which learners (and teachers) can access digital skills is severely limited.
Nevertheless, with urgency, the government and ministry of education must formulate national digital learning models that accommodate wherever learners are in terms of skills and context i.e. learners must be able to gain literacy and digital skills regardless of whether they come from a background where they have regularly encountered digital devices before.
In addition, this digital learning framework should look to flagship projects from other stakeholders in the education sector to scale their measures to the national level. In this way, some of the challenges of implementing a nationwide digital agenda for students can be mitigated.
For instance, when it comes to digitising curricula and lessons in a user-friendly, easily digestible and easily accessible technological format using the projector model approach where learners can watch and listen while their teachers facilitate and guide them through the process, the government can look to CSEC’s EduTech in Education Project piloted in Lilongwe and Mzimba districts.
When it comes to a more hands-off approach designed for children to work through on their own and at their own pace, with minimal adult supervision, the government can look to the Unlocking Talent in Malawi initiative by VSO Malawi, in partnership with Onebillion (non-profit software development) which focuses on marginalised groups across all education districts, directly benefiting Standard 1 and 2 learners, out of school youths and children with special needs, in-service and pre-service teachers, Teacher Training College lecturers, and Primary Education Advisors. The same project can be looked to by the government when considering how to circumvent low electricity availability by using cost-effective solar-powered Learning Centres.
Indeed, the insights and successes of these and other flagship digital learning projects must be utilised and leveraged by the government to formulate a contextually appropriate digital education framework for the learners in Malawi.
Collectively, we must deter the simultaneously ongoing and incoming education crisis by building the literacy of students and equipping them for the digital era.
