Yusuf Mwawa Minister of Education and Human Resource Development The Honourable Yusuf Mwawa was born on 10th October 1956. He obtained a Diploma in Clinical Medicine in 1980. After joining the Civil Service as a clinical officer he was regularly promoted in the period 1980 to 1985, to achieve one of the senior positions in the medical field as Director of Clinical Inspectorate with the Medical Council of Malawi. As a clinician he obtained, in 1985, a Diploma in Tropical Medicine from Liverpool School of Medicine in the United Kingdom. In 1989 he graduated from Howard University in the United States with a Bachelor of Science Degree. He then joined John Hopkins University in the United States and graduated in 1996 with a Master’s Degree in Public Health. He resigned from the Civil Service in the same year, 1996 and joined politics. He was appointed Minister for Water Development in 1999. He has also held the portfolio of Labour and Vocational Training Minister and Minister of Health. Currently, he is the Minister of Education and Human Resource Development and Leader of the House in the National Assembly. In April 2001 Howard University awarded him special recognition as an outstanding international alumnus of that university.

The challenge of provision of quality secondary school

Malawi is a small land locked country in the Southern Africa Sub-region with a wealth of unutilized and under-utilised resources, both human and physical.

Our national vision is to develop Malawi into a middle income, technologically advanced country by 2020. In line with the Millennium Development Goals, Malawi is committed to implementing programmes that emphasise on poverty reduction through the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) launched by Government in 2002. Human capital development through educational programmes is one of the critical pillars upon which the PRSP is anchored for its successful realization. I consider access to quality secondary education by our young people as the main lynch pin of all our efforts in pursuit of our vision. I therefore fully subscribe to what emphasized at the Education For All forum in Dakar that ‘primary education must be seen as a minimum, not a ceiling …’ Above all, I consider the human factor to be critical, particularly teachers in my Ministry.

As a newly appointed Minister I am looking forward to meeting with colleagues to exchange ideas on innovative approaches to ensuring quality secondary education. I find the themes of the debates satisfactory. I will be particularly interested to share with fellow Ministers from both developed and developing countries as well as colleagues from development partner agencies on the quality of education and the key role of teachers. How best can we strengthen the north to south and south to north partnership to ensure adequate supply of academically and professionally qualified secondary school teaching force, for instance? What best practice examples of private sector participation in teacher training can we adopt? What reforms can we introduce in the financing of teacher training institutions?

In Malawi we are currently reforming teacher education in response to the demands and challenges that the education system is going through. We have just developed and approved a national strategy for Teacher Education & Development, which addresses teacher education issues holistically. In addition, Malawi as the host of the Guidance, Counseling and Youth Development Centre for Africa is collaborating with participating member states in strengthening guidance and counseling courses in the teacher training colleges to ensure that counseling services are accessible to all persons in the education sector especially HIV/AIDS orphans.

I look forward to meeting you colleagues. My contact details are shown below:

Minister of Education and Human Resource Development
P/Bag 328
Lilongwe 3
MALAWI