QUESTIONS FROM CHILDREN TO THE STATE PRESIDENT 1.

What plans do you have for the education sector, especially in our primary schools? The PEOPLES PARTY recognizes that EDUCATION occupies a central place in the development of an individual and is a key investment for society as a whole. It is an instrument for economic transformation. It is an instrument for empowering the poor, the weak and the voiceless as it provides them with equal opportunity to participate in local and national development. Education helps to develop the youth of nation. Against this backdrop, the PEOPLES PARTY embraces education as a tool for the creation and expansion of human capacities and abilities. As Malawi moves into the second half-century of independence, the PEOPLES PARTY intends to implement the following programmes, interventions and initiatives to overhaul and transform our education sector to offer world class education:

o Recognizing that the current structure makes the Ministry of Education too large to ensure efficiency and effectiveness, the PEOPLES PARTY government will create separate ministries

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responsible for Higher Education and Research and another for Basic and Secondary Education. o Through the Ministry of Transport and Public Works, launch an aggressive programme to upgrade and expand education infrastructure (e.g. school blocks, teachers houses, equipment, desks etc.) throughout the country; o Create ways to generate additional resources for the education sector, including putting a 1 per cent levy per unit of airtime in order to support the modernization and transformation of the education sector; o Strengthen the school inspectorate at primary and secondary levels to ensure that education standards and quality match the overall development agenda; o Review curricula regularly to ensure relevance to emerging demands and the countrys development agenda; o Ensure compulsory learning of English from Early Child Development (ECD) and Science, Technology and Information and Communication Technologies at primary and secondary levels of education;

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o Improve special needs education by training more teachers, developing appropriate tools such as sign language and Braille, provision of adequate learning materials and equipment to facilitate learning and making infrastructure user friendly; o Encourage the learning of major foreign languages such as Chinese, French, Portuguese and Swahili among other foreign languages to enhance capacity of Malawi to engage with the international community; o Continue to provide free primary education; o Ensure 100% primary school completion rates while guaranteeing that learners acquire skills and knowledge that would enable them to participate fully in the economic and social life in line with the transformational agenda of the PEOPLES PARTY; o Initiate and promote programmes that empower the girl learner and other disadvantaged groups to mitigate against early drop out from school; o Implement the recommended teacher-pupil ratio across the entire education system to facilitate more effective learning by progressively recruiting teachers;

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o Extend the school feeding programme to all rural schools and disadvantaged urban areas; o Develop primary school clusters and link them to a community secondary school to enhance access to secondary education and build capacity of these community secondary schools; o Regular review and improving of teachers conditions of

service and offering them opportunities for upgrading and refresher courses; o Strengthen primary schools by having at least one graduate teacher at every primary school within ten years;

2. What will you do/add to improve our health sector, especially for children and youth services? During its first two years of the PEOPLES PARTY Administration, Government has made numerous interventions that have begun bearing fruits in the areas of child health, under five and maternal mortality, increased number of women delivering in health facilities, reduced HIV prevalence and increased coverage of anti-retro viral therapy (ART) and reduction of maternal mortality ratio from 670 to 460 death per every 100,000 live births.

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These have facilitated progress toward achieving some of the Millennium Development Goals. As we seek our own mandate, the Peoples party government is focused on achieving the following:

o Full involvement of youth in identifying their reproductive and health needs and designing programmes that respond to these needs with special attention to vulnerable and disadvantaged youth; o Provision of comprehensive sexuality education that promotes abstinence, mutual faithfulness and condom use, uptake of family planning services amongst the youth is advocated; o Adequate and accessible youth friendly health services among all youth is provided; o A deliberate programme for young people to access integrated counselling and testing, ART, HIV, PEP services and other nutrition supplements is set up; o Comprehensive Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights and HIV prevention information, services and life skills to in and out of school youths is promoted and sustained; o Intensify promotion of girls education programmes as a tool for empowering the girl child and addressing the problem of early marriages and teenage pregnancies;

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o Advocate for increase in the legal age of marriage , regulations and enforcement of laws that advance youth reproductive health

including sexual violence; o Scaling up HIV preventions programmes for young people. o Ensure that information on the effects of tobacco, alcohol and intoxicating drugs is accessible to all young people to protect them from effects of substance abuse; o Establishment of rehabilitation centres for youth drug addicts is established; o Enforcement of regulations and by-laws regarding usage of tobacco,

alcohol and intoxicating drugs among young people is advocated; o Young people are encouraged to actively participate in the production, processing and utilisation of nutritious foods o Reduce congestion in Central Hospitals by constructing District Hospitals in the cities of Blantyre, Zomba, Lilongwe and Mzuzu and enhance the operations of the existing clinics in these cities; o Construct a state of the art National Cancer Centre and train necessary specialist personnel for the centre; o Ensure that each district has a modern hospital within the next ten years; o Rehabilitate all district hospitals that are dilapidated;

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o Introduce incentives to health service personnel working in rural and underserved areas.

3. What programmes will you put in place to develop the skills of the youth in Malawi? Studies have shown that the formal employment sector is unable to absorb all employable young people. According to the Welfare Monitoring Survey (2011), the national labour participation rate among youth aged 15-24 years was 15.8 % with more females (17.4%) than males (13.3 %). According to the MGDS, unemployment among the youth has worsened over the last 20 years. To address these problems when given full mandate the Peoples Party government will embark on the following programmes in the area of skill development among our youth: o The establishment of community-based skills training programmes for the youths including village polytechnics, business incubation and youth multi-purpose skills training centres is promoted; o Promotion, provision and dissemination of youth tailored

information and provision of support for advanced training targeting out of school youth for increased agricultural production, agroprocessing and marketing is facilitated;
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o Support for the scale up of the national internship program mentorship programmes to facilitate youth to enter in the labour market in rural and urban areas is promoted. This will help tackle the issue of work experience that employers demand. o Special self-employment training programmes for young people with disabilities are provided; o The establishment of a Youth Development Fund to foster a dynamic climate for youth entrepreneurs to access credit is facilitated; o Establish strong linkages between the labour market and the education and training system to ensure that curricula are aligned to the needs of the labour market and that youth are being trained in fields where employment opportunities are available or are growing are fostered; and o Establish a Youth Training Centre in all major cities to train at least 1,000 youth per year in farming, animal husbandry and assorted technical skills. o Upgrade existing technical colleges by providing them with modern learning facilities and equipment; o Build at least 4 new technical colleges (one in each administrative region) to provide increased access to vocational and technical training;

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4. In addition to what we have asked, what will you do to protect girls from violence and abuse? o For girls in school, build more school hostels; o For girls out of school, advocate for enforcement of laws relating to violence against women and girls; laws relating to early marriages; o Encourage courts to give stiff penalties for rape and sexually related abuses; o Intensify the Programme on Adolescent Girls which seeks to give a second chance to adolescent girls that never attended or dropped out of school. 21 youths have graduated and received bakery,

hairdressing and electrical installation equipment. Some of the benefiting girls have come out of commercial sexual work and are now operating sustainable livelihoods. o Promote advocacy programmes on the effects of tobacco, alcohol and intoxicating drugs to young

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people to protect them from effects of substance abuse.

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