An Analysis of Rural-Urban Learning Performance Inequality in Malawi Primary Education

The promotion of regional equity has become an important topic in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). In Malawi, this issue is particularly important because of facing wide regional inequalities concerning income and living standards. In the field of education, the rural-urban learning performance inequality has been a persistent issue to be addressed, but there has not been enough evidence suggesting what causes were behind rural-urban student performance inequality in Malawi. This study examines how family, teacher, school, and community factors are associated with reading scores in Malawi from two perspectives, vertical inequality and horizontal inequality. This research analyses Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) data collected in 2013 through ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and quantile regression. The results indicate that there is an obvious rural-urban gap significantly in each factor and a variation in the effect among different performance levels. One of the important findings is that the education level of school heads above senior secondary education and management training for school heads have a significant and positive relationship with student reading scores in the rural area. Thus, deploying more qualified school heads and carrying out school head training in rural might improve student outcomes. Furthermore, community involvement is positively associated with learning outcomes in urban and it may be a determinant of student achievement in Malawi. Further study about this topic should be needed to set a more sophisticated theoretical framework, use more recent data, and a time-series analysis with data long after the implementation would provide a clearer picture of the policy’s effects.