ABSTRACT
Malawi is a small, land-locked, poverty-stricken country in Central Africa. Even by African standards Malawi is densely populated, with one million Mozambican refugees in addition to its own nine million people. The local economy is primarily based on agriculture, and as a result, rural settlement is the predominant pattern. In comparison with the western world, the country lacks technological advantages such as television and calculators: at school, for example, tables of logarithms are still quite commonly in use. The rate of participation in the educational system drops at each successive level. For instance, according to Ministry of Education and Culture (1990) statistics only 41.7 per cent of primary-school-aged children attend school, a figure which drops to only 3.4 per cent at the secondary level, and thereafter less than 1 per cent receive any form of tertiary education (Ministry of Education and Culture, 1990). Entry to secondary school is determined by means of a highly selective examination, the PSLE (Primary School Leaving Examination). A Ministry of Education affirmative action policy requires that one-third of all secondaryschool places be reserved for girls, but in order to achieve this quota, many girls are admitted to school with lower PSLE scores than is characteristic of the boys.
