Stone’s Throw In Malawi

I was enjoying a Carlsberg green with a couple of colleagues from the District Education Office recently. We were discussing how dire employment prospects are in Malawi, and the recent stampede of people trying to upgrade and improve their qualifications to get ahead in the better jobs or promotions.

This has partly been a result of the incumbent President’s focus on creating more of a meritocracy in Malawi. His executive has been promoting the need for education at all levels and appointing staff on the basis of qualifications, not on years of service. This has had repercussions at all levels of the system, from girls beginning to strive to stay in school, to their primary school teachers upgrading their own secondary school qualifications (now a requisite A-Level minimum). Higher up the system there are fast-tracking graduates, division managers obtaining their masters, crowned by the presidents’ staff with postgraduate degrees and the President himself with his impressive doctorate.

It is a welcome move from the days of nepotism and cronyism, although it has not come without controversy in Malawi, and lost the President some old time ‘friends’. But the rejuvenated emphasis it has placed on the value of education has been quite significant, and highly progressive.

It is not, however, rosy for everyone, in that the Malawian economy can’t meet the expectations of the hundreds of fresh-faced university and college graduates. The newspapers debate the difficulties around what is truly an employer’s market, in that businesses and NGOs can demand years of relevant work experience and high qualifications. This debate is not a million miles away from what you might find on a UK broadsheet; the difference here is that the often affluent, privileged graduates have extraordinarily high expectations that the world is at their feet and so have further to fall.

Anyway, as ever in Malawi, we did not spend too long on such serious subject matter and my colleague moved on quite quickly. He said whilst numbers of graduates increase in Malawi, they are rocketing elsewhere in Africa, like Nigeria.

“You know Kathy”, he says, “they say when you throw a stone in Nigeria, you will hit a graduate. But if you throw a stone in Zimbabwe, you will hit a fool!”

I laughed along, though previously unaware that Zimbabwe was the butt of jokes in Malawi – clearly the local “paddy” equivalent. I also thought of a few Malawian graduates I’d met recently who weren’t entirely sensible themselves.

“So what happens when you through a stone in Malawi?” I asked.

“You hit an NGO”.