Community Day Secondary School - Improving Girls' Access to Secondary Education

With fewer than 100 secondary schools in the 1990s, the Malawian government responded to significant demand for secondary education in 1998 by converting hundreds of skeletal Distance Learning Centers into a new type of secondary school – the "Community Day Secondary School" (CDSS). However, Community Day Secondary Schools still face significant challenges – from poorly trained teachers, to limited teaching and learning materials, to an outdated curriculum that is ill-suited to meet the needs of the economy or of the next generation of graduates. This has led to almost universally poor perceptions of the schools and by extension poor perceptions of the value of secondary education. More systemically, girls in Malawi face a number of obstacles when it comes to accessing and succeeding in school. If families can afford to send their children to secondary school, boys will usually be given preference over girls. In addition, they often are unable to see the value of a secondary education, as the national curriculum does not include applicable skills to improve livelihoods in rural Malawi. And with the only option for many being a poorly resourced Community Day Secondary School, parents often choose marriage or work for their daughters. In Malawi, less than 15% of women have any years of secondary school education, with 42% of girls married before the age of 18 – the twelfth highest rate of child marriage in the world. Without a full secondary education, girls are vulnerable to the effects of child marriage and extreme poverty – forced sex, teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, domestic abuse, and physically demanding agricultural work. Our partners have activated local stakeholders, such as community leaders, to start their own initiatives aimed at improving their local secondary schools and to enable more parents to send their girls to secondary school. We have already begun to see significant results: reduced school dropout rates, increased enrollment in secondary school, increased self-confidence of girls in the classroom, increased interest of teachers in their students' education, increased community support of girls' education, increased ability of parents to contribute to and participate in their girls' education and improvements in boys' attitudes and cooperation with girls, enabling girls to participate more freely in class activities.