Power to the people has become the mantra of Malawi’s decentralisation policy, as Capital Hill devolves government spending and decision-making to local councils closer to the citizenry.
This has made the districts, towns and cities battleground for efforts to improve access to quality education, once remote-controlled from the capital city in Lilongwe.
When we speak about Africa’s learning challenges, the conversation typically gravitates toward national policy frameworks, financing gaps and international commitments.
These discussions matter, but they can obscure where the real work happens and where real change is being made.
Across the country, district leaders and communities are demonstrating that sustainable foundational learning reform is possible when traditional authority, local resource mobilisation and accountability structures that communities own themselves are placed at the centre of the work.
The numbers from our districts are unsparing.
In Ntchisi, there is a 40.1 percent enrollment drop between Standard One and Standard Four, children who entered the system and then quietly disappeared from it. Besides, 89 schools operate with no books in English, Chichewa or Numeracy at the Standard Four level. Each book in Standards Three and Four serves eight learners.
In Mzimba, baseline assessments show that only around 20 percent of Standard Four learners demonstrate adequate reading comprehension. These challenges simultaneously touch the classroom, sub-national governance, and the broader community.
What the district experience reveals is that sustainable reform cannot rely on central directives alone.
When schools do not have adequate resources to procure textbooks, districts cannot afford to wait for the system to fill the gap; they have to become architects of their own solutions.
Local heroes
This is why our districts are elevating traditional authorities and culture as an accountability mechanism.
One of the most significant shifts in Malawi’s district-level reform has been the integration of traditional leadership into the daily governance of schooling.
In Ntchisi, a persistent challenge was a widespread community misreading of “free primary education”, interpreted by many parents as solely a government responsibility, which weakened home learning support and made it culturally acceptable to keep children home for early morning farm work.
District leaders responded by bringing localised data directly to senior chiefs. When traditional leaders saw in concrete terms what the dropout figures and learning outcomes meant for their communities, they acted.
Among others, chiefs in Ntchisi revived gulewamkulu, cultural dances to mark school attendance, a strong cultural mechanism that carries far more authority in those communities than a government circular.
The community leaders also established community-enforced penalties: Any household failing to comply with the 7.30am school start time faces a fine of two chickens paid through the chief.
This mechanism is local, enforceable and grounded in existing social structures.
Mzimba, the country’s largest district, is making similar strategic moves to leverage traditional influence to combat low parental engagement and irregular attendance.
Traditional leaders across zones enacted formal by-laws on student retention, launched localised ‘Go Back to School’ campaigns and used their ‘traditional courts’ to monitor daily attendance.
The chief-led task force effectively created a parallel accountability layer that operates continuously, not just during inspection cycles.
This community-led model is optimising what is already available.
The district experience also offers lessons in resource stewardship under constraint.
Faced with severe staffing imbalances, Mzimba’s district education team did not wait for recruitment drives from the centre.
We reallocated 57 teachers across the district, deliberately placing qualified educators into lower-primary classes where foundational skills are formed.
This was paired with rigorous, methodology-focused continuous professional development for 214 teachers across 14 zones.
To build on this, Mzimba is actively mobilising communities to take ownership of local resources by identifying reading champions per zone, establishing parent-teacher associations pledge systems and linking area development committee structures directly to school attendance monitoring.
On resources, the Blantyre Urban District Education Office moved beyond conventional procurement channels and mobilised over K66 million across 63 schools, procuring 15 300 textbooks and essential learning materials since August 2025.
Our resource mobilisation from the private-sector relationships gained a resilience that external dependency cannot provide.
Building systems
Improving foundational education outcomes requires strong systems that outlast current interventions.
Perhaps the most important dimension of Malawi’s district-level work is the accountability structures designed to persist beyond any particular programme cycle.
In Ntchisi, primary education advisers (PEAs) are now required to conduct a minimum of six structured monitoring visits per teacher per term, creating a shift from ad-hoc supervision to regular oversight.
Schools are establishing Talular committees to coordinate the production and procurement of teaching and learning materials from locally sourced resources.
To address the practical reality of fuel and transport shortages that constrain monitoring, communities are introducing a local “money bank” concept, pooled community funds that directly finance PEA transit and sustain unannounced school inspections.
Lessons from within
What does this mean for the continent?
The Malawi district experience carries implications that extend well beyond its borders. The lesson from Ntchisi, Mzimba, and Blantyre Urban is that districts and communities cannot afford to remain passive recipients of national policy, they must become active architects of their children’s learning journey.
For countries seeking to replicate this approach, these could be their take-aways:
First, district leaders must be willing to take localised data directly to community structures, not to report failure, but to convert traditional authority into genuine school governance.
Second, optimisation of existing resources—through teacher reallocation, community-based procurement and private-sector engagement—can create meaningful headroom even where budgets are thin.
Third, accountability mechanisms must be institutionalised within communities themselves, not delegated entirely to government inspection systems that are chronically under-resourced.
Lastly, leaders must never underestimate the profound power of culture and the collective agency of our communities.
In a continent like Africa, where social fabrics are tightly knit and the cultures are living, breathing forces, the most sustainable solutions rarely come from the top down, they emerge from the people themselves.
Harnessing this community is not just the key to unlocking foundational learning, it is the blueprint for any lasting social reform.
Circumstances are changing. The future of Africa’s education reform will be built by district managers, head teachers, and village chiefs who take proactive, sustained custody of learning outcomes in their communities, every morning, every term, every year. Malawi is showing what that commitment looks like in practice. The question for the continent is whether we are ready to resource, recognise, and replicate it.
*The authors
Tambala is Blantyre Urban district education manager, Chakwakwa is Ntchisi District education manager whereas Nungu is the director for education, youth and sports in Mzimba and Human Capital Africa.
