The Malawi Schools Project

Our Vision

• To help as many learners as we can – boys and girls – to access the school system.  Without education, most are locked in a life of unending poverty, hard labour, and in some cases, exploitation. With the withdrawal of USAID and the increasing damage from climate change, children from these communities face an uncertain future at best.
• To enable the brightest of children access college and university places to be the future leaders of their communities.
• To support innovative community projects to improve children’s lives.

MSP believes that supporting education is the only way to give these children a chance for a better future, and the country a better prospect for growth.

About The Malawi Schools Project

The children in our area are bright and keen to learn, but many cannot afford to go to school. In 2017 we set up a bursary scheme to pay for school and examination fees, uniforms, exercise books and school supplies, solar lamps for the children to study at home, and bicycles for students living some distance from school. We built a number of school blocks. We also made some headway in improving teacher and head teacher training in the area, to help the children get more from their time at school.  Post-COVID we have focussed on supporting those of our bursary students who have been granted university and college places.

International Aid

Few of the large aid agencies offer help in the Mpasa area. There are few places with running water or electricity, no hotels or restaurants, no western-style houses. Few if any of those who occasionally pass through the area in aid agency trucks actually stay. And the withdrawal of USAID has been disastrous for the education and health sectors.

Education in Mpasa

Malawi is the 4th poorest country in the world. Seventy per cent of the population live on less than $2.15 per day. It is a peaceful country, with a fully functioning democracy, but it has few natural resources and many of the villages have neither power nor running watering water. Its people are its real treasure – and they are delightful: warm, cheerful, hard-working, intelligent.

English is the country’s official language and is widely spoken – with varying degrees of proficiency – by those who have completed primary school education.  There are some excellent teachers (though too few of them), and the children are bright, but for many of them education is an impossibility. They need money for school fees, uniforms (or decent clothes to go to school), exercise books and pens, and light to enable them to study at home. In a country plagued in recent years by drought and food shortages, families spend almost every last penny they have on food, leaving little or nothing for their children’s education. MSP believes that supporting education is the only way to give these children a chance for a better future, and the country a better prospect for growth.