In March 1990, the United Nations encouraged all countries to embrace adequate primary education and adopt the World Declaration on “Education for All” together with a framework for action.
The “education for all” declaration served as a pledge to provide all children with top-notch elementary education. This was with a view to eliminating inequalities in enrollment, building a robust socio-economic base within society, and enhancing civil education on the social and economic benefits of education at the community level.
Because of this, free primary education was introduced in Malawi, in the year 1994.
Therefore, one thousand classrooms were constructed, and a new curriculum was rolled out to 5,500 schools. Consequently, several school feeding programs were introduced to some school-going students in order to attract more students to schools.
It is over twenty years now since Free Primary Education was introduced in the state. Ever Since then, the consequences of this decision have been felt by children in schools both positively and negatively.
At first, most needy students were able to access education without paying for it. On the other hand, the majority have survived a school system that had been below capacity and lacked the physical resources to accommodate all the entrants as fees payment were abolished.
As a result, available statistics indicated that the number of pupils rose sharply from 1.9 million to 3.2 million between the years 1994 and 1995. In the same manner, some schools required students to study outside beneath the shade of trees due to high enrollment.
Due to such effects together with a high student-teacher ratio, inadequate teaching certifications, and a lack of educational resources, the Malawian government decided to again revisit this great idea which was welcomed back then.
In light of this, the government began supporting a strategy in 2013 to provide Malawian children hope for a high-quality education by working with groups like Unlocking Talent and One Billion.
The fundamental goal of Unlocking Talent, along with VSO Malawi and their partners, was to extend transformational learning to every child in a sustainable manner. And When it came to students’ general reading and early numeracy skills, they intended to produce equally favourable results for males and girls.
An outcome that is comparable in importance to the findings of an eight-month RCT study on tablet-based learning for basic math and literacy.
As it was said, this had been deliberately made public for a limited sample of two public primary schools in the capital area.
They claim to have succeeded in doing this for a number of reasons.
The criteria must, among other things, represent both urban and peri-urban environments, meet sample size requirements, and satisfy a new need for the Unlocking Talent program.
According to their findings, the chosen urban school had about 3,900 students, and the peri-urban school had roughly 3,200 students in Standards 1–8. (grades 1– 8).
Since the two study schools were chosen on purpose rather than at random, the impact estimates that were produced did not apply to all Malawian primary schools as a whole. Instead, they represented the average effects for the two study schools.
Additionally, the introduction of the Tablet-Based Learning initiative by the educational software developer Euro Talk, based in the United Kingdom, has accelerated development in tablet-based learning.
The project which is presently being tested in a few local schools is yet another result of the collaboration between the governments of Malawi and Scotland.
The Malawian government, through the ministry of education, science, and technology, initiated the program in 2010 as a trial project using tablet computers in 30 schools with the Euro Talk app “Masamu,” which is meant to teach fundamental numeracy in the local language.
EuroTalk on the other side said in a statement that one of the leading universities in the UK, The University of Nottingham will be evaluating the project in 2018 in order to establish if children using EuroTalk’s ‘Masamu’ maths application learn faster than their classmates.
According to them, differences in learning between boys and girls in Malawi could be prevented with the help of interactive tablet technology.
Psychologists at the university further added that when introduced at the beginning of a child’s education, the use of an interactive learning app in Malawi could reduce the emergence of gender differences. They also reported that in Malawi, a low-income nation in Sub-Saharan Africa with a history of underachievement and gender inequality throughout its educational system, significant gender differences appeared in mathematics and reading over the first grade of primary school.
By the end of primary school, less than half of Malawian young people have learned the basics of reading and numeracy.
The EuroTalk team’s mission is to provide one billion children with the finest education possible, and they view the upcoming review as a crucial first step.
Using Malawi as a starting point, the company plans to spread the idea to other nations while generating the applications in the native tongue of each child, depending on how well it does.
EuroTalk, a firm founded in 1991, is best recognized for its selection of language-learning software available in more than 130 languages and utilized by more than 20 million individuals worldwide.
Today, Malawi is seeing a rise in young people’s literacy skills as a result of all these institutions working to improve the country’s educational system. Africa is prepared for Vision 2030, as seen by this.
