Malawi struggles to fund increased access to higher education, but without a better educated workforce its economy will remain fragile
Published 17th Oct 2026, 06:00 BST
Elida Chithumba’s homeland of Malawi needs her. She is six weeks into a mathematics and education degree course in a country desperate for maths teachers, yet her future is uncertain. The 18-year-old is one of four children of poor subsistence farmers. She applied for a student loan after winning a place at Unima, Malawi’s top university, but like a quarter of this year’s applicants, she was refused support.
As she waits to hear the results of her appeal, she depends on the generosity of friends to survive. The few thousand Malawi kwacha her parents were able to scrape together to help her through her first weeks away from home are long gone. And as the deadline for the first instalment of her tuition fees loomed, she had to ask relative strangers for help.
If she doesn’t pay the first term’s bill in full by November 6, she will be forced to leave university. Yet Malawi is desperate for maths teachers, particularly in the country’s under-resourced community day secondary schools, where Elida was a pupil.
The generosity of others
Comfort Galimoto, 22, is in his final year at the same university. He is studying philosophy and is an enthusiastic fan of David Hume. It may seem an ‘indulgent’ degree in a country where the majority of people live below the poverty line, but Malawi needs thinkers just as much as it needs maths teachers or health workers.
His application for a loan was partly successful. For the first time in four years, his request for support for living expenses was rejected, yet his father – a hospital porter – doesn’t have any spare cash to send him. To eat, Comfort also depends on the generosity of others.
Veronica Jafali, 18, is studying the science of food and nutrition, not so she can be a home economics teacher, but as the basis of a career helping tackle malnutrition and hunger. Half of Malawi’s 22 million population is under 18. Four-in-ten children under five are affected by undernutrition, with stunted growth. Lack of nutritious food also limits a child’s cognitive development and resistance to disease. Malawi’s national dish, nsima – a porridge made of maize flour – may fill a child’s belly, but on its own it does little for overall health.
Veronica’s expertise will help improve her country’s wellbeing, but she too has just been refused a student loan. She received one for her first year, and while her family’s circumstances have not changed, she did not qualify for her second.
Her father, desperate to keep his eldest daughter at university, scoured his district for help, finally finding an Islamic charity that offered to meet Veronica’s tuition fees for this academic year. Her family will struggle to meet her living costs, but they will make whatever sacrifices needed to keep her in university.
An existential challenge
The economies of Malawi and Scotland may be very different, but they face the same question over the funding of higher education: how to share the cost of university between the state and students so that access is not dependent on wealth or privilege, but on merit and potential.
Both have still to find the best solution, but for Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries, increasing access to higher education is far more than a political dilemma, it is an existential challenge.
It cannot develop its fragile economy if its population is uneducated, but that same fragile economy struggles to support the expansion of higher education. Veronica, Comfort and Elida were not refused a student loan because they did not meet the criteria for one. They lost out because there were thousands more applicants than the resources available. Their luck ran out.
Unesco’s recent report on global trends in higher education reveals that the number of people enrolled in university has more than doubled since 2000, with 269 million students worldwide. Only nine per cent of the global student population is in sub-Saharan Africa, where arguably the need is greatest.
But as the world becomes more complex, and tech bros like Elon Musk and Open AI’s Sam Altman exert ever more control over everything from the war in Ukraine to global health research, all countries, north and south, need their citizens to be better educated than at any time in human history.
The key to a better world
The world needs people who can deal with the threats posed by technological revolution, climate change and economic shocks. Countries need their citizens to be innovative, enterprising and productive, and also to have the confidence and knowledge to hold political and other elites to account.
Education, from early years through to later life, is the key to a better world, but it cannot be restricted to those who already have every privilege. Investment in quality education, whether it is early years, secondary school, vocational training or university is not a policy choice for governments – it should be their priority. It is the foundation for everything else, from good public health to tackling poverty and encouraging economic growth.
Without the extra support she received to complete her secondary education, Elida Chithumba would be spending her days planting maize and fetching water. Instead, she is studying calculus.
Without continued support for her university education, she would have to go back to her village home where she would face the prospect of a life burdened by multiple pregnancies, steeped in poverty. She is lucky that, even if her appeal for a government loan fails, there are people prepared to support her dream of becoming a maths teacher.
And there are millions of Elidas, Veronicas and Comforts across the world, including in Scotland. Young people denied the best possible education because they don’t have the advantages, social and financial, enjoyed by their better-off peers. The world cannot afford to lose their talents.