It is a sweltering afternoon in Kafulatira Village, Traditional Authority Chimutu in Dowa District, where an illegal gold mining site buzzes with a crowd jostling in the pits, digging, hauling and hoping.

A few metres away, Enelesi Chisale, 29, sits with her children. An exercise book lies open on the ground. Her son, a Standard Four learner, stares helplessly at an arithmetic problem he cannot solve.

Chisale with children at Kafulatira gold panning site. | Clement chinoko

“I try to help him,” she says, her eyes drifting to the miners. “But the numbers mean nothing to me.”

In the vicinity, children emerge from the mine, their faces soiled.

“When I see children digging in the pits, I am afraid,” Chisale says. “The mines collapse. But if my son loses hope in school, what future is there?”

Across Malawi, low literacy levels among parents quietly undermine their children’s education.

A study by Mervin Mutonga of Domasi College of Education in Zomba found that many parents are unable to support their children in developing reading skills in early grades because they themselves cannot read or write.

The researcher documented parents watching helplessly as their children struggled with literacy.

The report quotes one parent as having said: “Though teachers encourage us to teach our children how to read, my challenge is that I am illiterate.”

Stark reality

The findings paint a stark picture: Parents who never learned to read are now raising children who struggle with literacy.

Without support at home, many learners fall behind in the early years and others drop out.

“This pattern is common across many communities,” says DVV International communications officer Dyson Mthawanji. “The illiterate parents will see their kids struggling with basic literacy and numeracy skills, but there is nothing they can do to help. Such families face the risk of having uneducated generations, potentially sustaining a cycle of poverty.”

DVV International supports adult learning and education through policy development, community skill centres and literacy programmes.

“Parents should enrol for adult literacy and education classes to acquire literacy and numeracy skills and other relevant life skills,” says Mthawanji. “Adult learning is the backbone of community development.”

Samuel Ziba, principal community development officer at the National Centre for Literacy and Adult Education in the Ministry of Gender, Children, Disability and Social Welfare, says adult learning and education programmes could help break this cycle.

Supporting parents such as Chisale to learn basic reading and writing skills gives them the tools to support their children’s education, he states.

To strengthen adult literacy, the government has established community learning centres in 11 districts to support non-formal skills development among literacy graduates. An adult literacy and education management information system now tracks adult literacy programmes in ten districts.

In addition, Ziba said, tertiary institutions such as Magomero Community Development College and the Catholic University of Malawi in Chiradzulu teach adult learning.

The National Adult Literacy and Education Strategic Plan of 2022 to 2027 seeks to strengthen coordination, collaboration and networking through research.

To close the literacy gap, policymakers envisioned government spending of about K4.7 billion on programmes and K58 billion on instructor honoraria.

However, a year before the deadline, Ziba’s centre government allocated only K933 million for adult literacy by 2025.

For staff salaries, only K7 billion was provided.

This, Ziba says, represents just 20 percent of programme funding needs and 12 percent of the required remuneration.

The disparities are evident in local communities, where instructors who could help Chisale read and write receive a meagre K30 000 per month, just two-thirds of the K72 800 minimum wage for domestic workers.

“To collect this amount, instructors often have to travel long distances to banks, spending money on transport,” said Ziba, adding that honoraria adjusted in 2017 remain unpaid.

Teaching materials are also scarce. Only 75 000 copies of the Chuma ndi Moyo learners’ textbook exist, a quarter of the national requirement of 300 000.

Literacy supervisors, each responsible for up to ten classes scattered across villages, have no vehicles to reach them. The national control centre itself lacks transport.

The gap between policy and reality has a human face.

The 2018 census revealed that 4.7 million of 15 million Malawians aged five and older were illiterate.

However, over 2.1 million people aged at least 15 are within the age group targeted by adult literacy programmes in the country.

A vision in danger

According to the national policy launched in 2020, such high illiteracy levels threaten to derail the nation’s agenda to transform Malawi into an inclusive, wealthy, self-reliant, industrialised upper-middle-income nation by 2063.

That threat clearly includes the homework disconnect between illiterate parents and their children.

“If there was a class nearby or if someone could volunteer to teach me to read and write, I would walk there every day,” says Chisale, gazing at her son before switching to the mine.

According to the Group Village Head Kafulatira, the illicit gold rush has claimed seven lives—including three children—in a year. Fifteen more have been injured.

“I do not want my children to end up in those pits. I want them to have what I never had,” Chisale says.

 For Chisale, the bigger question is whether these programs will reach the far-flung outskirts of Dowa with the glaring funding shortfalls.