Tag Archives: Malawi

Send a Child Back to School

Only 27% of children in Malawi complete elementary school. Many drop out because they lack something as basic as a pen or a school uniform. Renald Banikani, pictured here, stopped going to school because his single pair of tattered clothing was unfit for the classroom. As the new school year begins, you can help Goods for Good [...]

BIC Malawi Donates to G4G

Great news from the field this week: BIC Malawi donated over 96,000 items to Goods for Good! BIC’s donation included over 80,000 pens and the always-hard-to-come-by fun stuff like markers and glitter glue (which the kids are going to LOVE). These materials will be distributed through our Pens for Progress program, which provides two pens [...]

Go 4 Good

In only 8 days, six Goods for Good volunteers leave for Malawi! As part of our Go 4 Good volunteer program, this group will tutor standard 8 students at St. Mathias Primary School in Chezi, Malawi in preparation for their entrance exam into secondary school. With an average teacher to student ratio of 1:83 and a large [...]

Blues of Learning Under Trees

 

G4G Program Manager, Aaron Lewani, sent us an article in Malawian publication The Nation, about local school conditions. A desperate lack of school blocks is forcing students to drop out of school and teachers to loose dedication to their work. Rodrick Salambula, head teacher at Matsimbe Primary School, said that students who are forced to learn [...]

Malawi Needs New Approach to Fighting AIDS

 

Despite a falling AIDS-related mortality rate, changes need to be made to Malawi’s health care system to make better use of the aid it receives to treat AIDS and lower HIV transmission rates, experts say.  Some crucial problems Malawi faces in its fight against HIV include a poor health care infrastructure and inefficient health insurance schemes. [...]

Student Profile: Levison Masauko

 

Levison Masauko is seven years old. He lives in the Dowa district of Malawi and is a standard 2 student at St. Mathias Primary School. Levison is an orphan and has lived at St. Mary’s, a Goods 4 Good partner and orphan care center, for the majority of his young life.  “I came to stay [...]

The Double Burden

 

As is the case in most poor countries, girls in Malawi are often burdened with the responsibility of becoming a wage earner in the family.  Because the Malawi government only pays for primary school, many poor families send their daughters to work as domestic workers around the age of 14 instead of sending them to [...]

Ending Famine by Ignoring the Experts

 

This New York Times article explains the secret of Malawi’s recent record-breaking corn harvests. After a disastrous harvest in 2005 that forced 5 million of Malawi’s 13 million people to rely on emergency food aid, President Bingu wa Mutharika decided to reinstate fertilizer subsidies, a practice that many Western countries rely on themselves yet discourage poor countries like [...]

Teacher Profile: Mr. Kachikopa

Mr. Langitoni Kachikopa was born in 1968 in the Dowa district of Malawi. He joined the Ministry of Education as a primary school teacher in 1987 after completing his Teacher Training College education. “My ambition was to become a teacher so I am very happy that I achieved that,” said Mr. Kachikopa. He is married [...]

Helping our Families Spend Their Money Better

  We spend a lot of time at Goods 4 Good bringing pens and supplies to schools and families in Malawi, and it’s nice to see the differences these materials make, no matter how small.  This week, Aaron Lewani, our program director in Malawi, spoke to the chiefs in Dzalo, a community where we have been distributing [...]