It can well begin with Phungu Joseph Nkasa’s hit, Zikuchokera kuti.
In his chorus, Nkasa asks: Nkhondo ya mumtima, zikuchokera kuti? Yolimbana ndi moyo, zikuchokera kuti? Nkhani ya ziphuphu, zikuchokera kuti? Wayambisa ndani? Mayesa ndinu nomwe?
Writing in his book Living my destiny, Austin Mkandawire describes how Nyasaland was a country divided by race.
Under British colonial rule, Africans were denied opportunities enjoyed by Europeans.
They had limited access to quality education, senior government positions, fertile land and political power.
Exclusion was the order of the day.
The injustices gave birth to native associations across the country. Although they were initially organised along ethnic and regional lines, these organisations soon realised they shared a common enemy—colonial discrimination.
The Angoni Native Association in Ntcheu, the Blantyre Native Association, the Mombera Native Association in Mzimba, the North Nyasa Native Association and the West Nyasa Native Association eventually united under the Nyasaland African Congress (NAC).
Together, they became the backbone of the nationalist movement that culminated in Malawi’s independence on July 6, 1964.
But 62 years later, structures of exclusion that once kept Africans from participating fully in their own country have, in many ways, continued to keep women on the margins of political and economic decision-making.
Under the current systems, women, just like Africans during the colonial era, are denied opportunities enjoyed by men. They have limited access to quality education, senior government positions, fertile land and political power.
Take for example, Parliament, where women secured 48 of the 229 seats in the 2025 elections (21 per cent), a slight increase from 45 seats in 2019. However, this still falls far short of meaningful representation.
This is despite the Political Empowerment of Women Strategy (2024–2030), which targeted women winning 35 per cent of parliamentary and local government seats in the 2025 elections.
Not only that, local councils also remain overwhelmingly male, while leadership positions in government institutions, State-owned enterprises and the corporate sector continue to be dominated by men.
According to Marcel Chisi, coordinator of Men for Gender Equality Now, the underrepresentation of women in leadership and education is deeply rooted in cultural beliefs.
He said in many parts of Malawi, particularly in the Northern Region where the practice of lobola (bride price) is common, girls have traditionally been considered candidates for marriage rather than candidates for education or leadership.
“With that mindset, you can already see that very few women would have the opportunity to excel in school because parents would rather focus on educating the boy than the girl. On the flip side, in the matrilineal set-up, women were still expected to be custodians of their homes because husbands would marry into the woman’s village and the family would be raised there. Under such circumstances, parents often felt that educating a girl was a risky investment because she might leave for town in search of employment and marry someone outside the community,” Chisi said.
He could be right.
By 1994, women made up barely three per cent of Parliament and only two had ever served as Cabinet ministers.
Any other women were largely celebrated as Mbumba za Kamuzu—loyal performers at political rallies—but remained absent from decision-making, according to Drivers of Change, a research by Edge Kanyongoro and colleagues.
And then, read Malawi’s commitments to gender equality. They are very strong.
The country has ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (Cedaw), the Maputo Protocol, and the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) Protocol on Gender and Development, all of which call for equal participation of women in decision-making structures.
Yet the country continues to grapple with exclusion.
Surprisingly, Mozambique—despite emerging from 16 years of civil war—has consistently recorded higher representation of women, according to the African Barometer, even though one would expect it to have had fewer female graduates to take up senior positions.
In Malawi, however, since the first multiparty elections, women’s representation in Parliament has fluctuated in a cycle of hope and reversal: 5.6 per cent (1994), 9.3 per cent (1999), 14 per cent (2004), a rise to 22 per cent in 2009 following heavy investment under the 50:50 Campaign, then a decline to 16.7 per cent (2014), a recovery to 23 per cent (2019), and another drop to 21 per cent (2025).
Emma Kaliya of the Human Rights Resource Centre is very angry about this.
She says Malawi cannot continue celebrating commitments on paper while failing to translate them into actual representation by adopting quota systems, as other countries have done.
“We have policies and strategies for capacity, but where are the results? Women are still being left behind in spaces where decisions about their lives are being made. This is not about a lack of capable women; it is about a system that continues to exclude them 62 years after independence,” she argues.
However, Chisi believes if women are given access to education, the opportunities available to them are broad, as demonstrated by such appointments.
“Rather than saying, let us lobby for more women, sometimes we need to ask: where are the women? Because it cannot just be everyone. So there is a need for capacity because it takes certain levels of aptitude,” he said.
