Teacher Distribution in Malawi: a political settlement and accountability perspective

Despite Malawian government policies being aimed at reforming the persistent unequal distribution of teachers, teachers continue to be concentrated in urban areas. The objective of this research conducted by Dr Asma Zubairi aims to understand why government policies have failed, given this being an underexplored area within the empirical research.
This presentation will highlight the need to understand relationships of accountability related to teacher management, and what effect power and politics have had on these relationships. In doing so, the findings of this research contribute to an emerging field in international education that interrogates what influence politics has on service delivery.
This discussion will illustrate ways in which formal accountability relationships between teachers and education officials responsible for managing them are weakened through the informal relationships which supplant them. While previous studies relating to teacher management in Malawi have broadly quantified the inequity and inefficiency of teacher deployment, this research piece redresses what has overwhelmingly been an apolitical approach to understanding this long-standing problem