March 7, 2012

Of fuel queues in Malawi

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I left work 30 minutes before closing time today so I could line up for the commodity that, for over two solid years now, has eluded motorists, grain millers operating in my friend Godfrey’s to-be-electrified-after-2014 home village and everyone that it almost seems golden – fuel. I have been prudent enough with the last supply that I was so fortunate to have accessed a little over three weeks ago – walking to the grocery store whenever I can (good for my exercise) and cutting down on non-essential travel. Granted, this behavior change has bought me some days but it was only a matter of time before the orange light popped up again.

Nobody wants to spend their evening waiting for what should be a basic commodity. No mother deserves to lose their life and that of their unborn child because the ambulance that should have taken them to the major hospital to treat a complication is grounded due to a lack of fuel. In this 21st century, my 85 year old grandmother should never have to draw out her labor-intensive stone-age tools to prepare maize flour for her next meal. Unfortunately, that’s what is happening every day in Malawi. It is very unacceptable.

But then Malawians are a patient lot. I wonder how my Kenyan friend and his Kikuyu kinsmen would react if they were faced with the same hardships. Not that Malawians should take machetes and rise against the authorities. It’s about demanding of authorities what is rightfully theirs. The president has made it clear the current problems will be fixed when he is out of office, in 2014. That’s ONLY two more years to go…

PS: after three hours, I’m still on the line waiting to get a little gold…and if i succeed (the gas station doesn’t close because it is very late or the supply does not run out), I will get 15 liters because there is not enough for everyone. That should be enough to run around for three days, and who knows what will happen thereafter.

 

July 25, 2010

Rescuing young people from scavenging

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It is my second weekend back in Malawi. A friend asks me to help him collect data for an evaluation of a project that has a catchy short name – SY2SE. He won the consultancy a while ago from among several bidders. I am delighted to help him out. During the process of familiarizing myself with SY2SE, I learn that SY2SE is a project that has been going on since 2006. It was being implemented by the National Youth Council of Malawi, a body that was established by an Act of Parliament many years ago with a mandate to address issues/problems affecting Malawi’s young people. I also discover that SY2SE stands for “Scavenging Youths to Scholars and Entrepreneurs”, which is what the project sought to accomplish.

SY2SE, in brief, is a project that sought to stop young people from one area of Lilongwe City (Malawi’s capital) from scavenging at one of the city’s major dumpsites. Scavenging at the dumpsite is a common practice among youths and adults alike in this part of rural Lilongwe (the “city” is sub-divided into Lilongwe Urban and Lilongwe Rural). Our two guides from St. Peters, a local NGO that the Youth Council collaborated with on the project, inform us that ‘waste collection’ is a more polite description of the activity. They tell us that the project has so far benefited about 90 families out of 3,000 who initially registered. The idea was to target young people who frequent the dumpsite and offer them scholarships to go back to school. The project provides each student with school supplies (uniforms, notebooks, pens, etc) and pays for his/her school fees (if any). For those youths who cannot go back to school because of age, they are taught vocational skills (carpentry, brick-laying, tailoring and knitting) and are provided with start-up capital after the training to establish their own trades. A total of 53 young people have been assisted to date in one of these ways. To ensure sustainability, the project works with each student’s family to help them get a loan from a local bank to start a small business.

For my first interview, I talk to a woman who used to look after an orphaned boy who collected waste at the dumpsite. The boy now lives with his grandmother. He is back in school. My respondent received a loan from the local bank for 10,000 Malawi Kwacha (about $66). She used the money to start a trading business – she buys charcoal and resells it. She also sells popcorn. I learn that the charcoal trading business brings her a better profit margin than the popcorn business. She makes a profit of K200 on every sack of charcoal she sells. In total, she makes about K2,000 a month in profits when the times are good. During our interview, she expresses her delight at being selected for the project and how much it has changed her life. She now has food to put on the table and some money for other basic necessities. She has nearly paid off her loan, including interest which she told me was charged at 2.9% per month. As I close the interview, I feel a sense of happiness for her. At the same time, I wonder how she is able to help the boy who now lives with the poor grandmother.

For my next interview, I talk to a young woman (aged 25) who tells me another inspiring story. She lost her mother when she was a teen and has been living with her father since. She walks me through the agonies of growing up without a mom (mothers are breadwinners in most rural households – they fend for the family). She dropped out of school in Standard 7 because they did not have the money for school supplies (uniforms, books, etc). They usually went hungry for days. About a year ago, she decided she wanted to start up a trading business but did not have the capital for it. She however had a small amount of money given to her by a stranger. With that money, she went to the dumpsite to buy plastic bags for resale. The other kids at the dumpsite would dig out the plastic (shoppers) bags, empty them and sell them to her. She would take them home, wash them and take them to the market for sale. She managed to grow her capital to 4,000 Kwacha, enough to start a proper trading business. It was during that time she was seen at the dumping site that she was identified as a potential beneficiary for the SY2SE project. At the same time she had her 4,000 Kwacha from selling plastic bags, she got a loan for 10,000 Kwacha through the project. She used the money to start trading in dry beans. She buys the beans from other traders and sells them for a profit. I asked her if that is what she wanted from the project and she told me she would have been happy to learn a skill – tailoring. She dreamed of opening up her own tailoring shop some day and employing other people but the project did not give her the opportunity to choose how she wanted to be involved. The trading business does not look sustainable, one negative shock to the household (e.g. a serious illness) and all the capital will be lost. She will have to start all over again.

Felix standing outside the chief's house

I manage to talk to one student, Felix Kuseli, who is in Form 3 at a local secondary school (an equivalent of the junior level of high school). He is 21 and he remembers starting waste collection (scavenging) when he was only 8. He had been going to the dumpsite until a year ago. He tells me he started going there because of peer pressure. He eventually got used to being at the dumpsite. The project offered him a scholarship to go back to school. He enrolled in Form 1 (high school freshman). Last year, he passed his Junior Certificate exams in secondary school. He will sit for the final exams next year, but the project has already ended and so has the support he got from it. He is pretty confident that he will make the final exam but he does not know how he will get the money to pay for the school fees for the senior year of high school. Already, his parents had to borrow money for his school fees because the project has been late in making the payments. I ask him if he would consider going back to the dumpsite and he tells me that is a closed chapter. He is more happy and healthy now than he has ever been.

I am anxious to visit the dumpsite. After the interviews, we drive in our little old Toyota Corolla to the site. The road is bumpy, as are all the roads in this part of Lilongwe, and it takes us a while to get there. Our two guides brief us on the ground rules that we have to follow when we get to the site. No one is allowed to spit while at the site, however awful they feel. If flies cover your face, you should never attempt to chase or remove them. You should all keep a straight, happy face. You should never take pictures of anyone unless they offer you the chance to. Anything to the contrary is offensive to the people at the dumpsite and they can kick you out. A female reporter from the country’s only TV station nearly got beat up here for breaking these house rules.

Some of the people at the dumpsite

We find boys and girls as young as 7 at the dumpsite. They have a leader, a mid-30s man who directs activities at the site. He had been offered the chance to learn a skill at one of the technical colleges in the city through the project but he bolted a few days into the training. As he talks to our two guides from St. Peters, he regrets his decision to quit the training as he now sees his classmates running their own carpentry and tailoring shops in the community. As a leader at the site, he gets to pick first when the dumpster offloads. After he has selected the “goods” from the waste pile, he lets the others know they can start collecting whatever they want. He still retains the right to every valuable item – he can confiscate anything he thinks is valuable that has been found by the other people at the dumpsite. This is a dumpsite for everything from expired grocery and food items to used medical supplies. We observe there are broken glasses and sharp metals too at the site. Some of the young people at the site are wearing mismatched boots (collected from the site) while others are barefooted. They use sticks and their hands to dig for valuables from the heaps of waste and they have no gloves on. During our tour of the dumpsite, we learn that there is one particular dumpster that is everyone’s favorite. They nicknamed her Dalo (or Darling) because she brings in more food than every other truck. Dalo brings in rotten chickens, beef and everything from grocery stores in Lilongwe. Some of the food brought in by Dalo is sold to the community – to households and to vendors processing food by the roadside. In our conversation with one of the chiefs in the area, he admitted to eating chicken from the dumpsite.

The dumpsite used to have a fence around it but the people who collect the waste took it down because it prevented the

Me at the dumpsite

m from getting there. As we leave the site, I feel so sick to my stomach. The air at the site is awful, my clothes stink. There are flies everywhere on the ground. I wonder how these young people would survive such a place. I have questions for Felix that I want answers to. How did he make it from such a place? He admitted to getting sick once in a while but if I spent my every day here, I would barely make a week. I am physically and mentally exhausted. It has been a long day but I never imagined it would be as enlightening as it has been depressing. I have always thought I grew up in poverty (and I did, by our standards of poverty) but I had never fathomed anything like this happening in the capital city of Malawi. Urban poverty in Malawi is worse than rural poverty. This, to me, is a huge public health issue. I have questions for the city assembly who manage this dumpsite. My friend has scheduled a meeting with them and I hope I will be able to get the answers that I need.

 

July 7, 2010

Measuring the Impacts of Malawi’s Agricultural Input Subsidy Program

Posted by Chibwana Chris under Policy | Tags: , , |
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Today feels awesome. My thesis got accepted for publishing, which effectively means I am done with my MS training (the thesis defense was last week). I am pretty impressed with how much ground I covered for my thesis research. As I mentioned earlier, I have been working on measuring the impacts of the Farm Input Subsidy Program in Malawi on a series of phenomena. Previous evaluation studies have focused mainly on the program’s impact on national production of maize. My research investigated how the program impacted the behavior of smallholder farmers and other outcomes. Here’s an abstract of the thesis:

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Abstract

Thesis title: Measuring the Impacts of Agricultural Input Subsidies on Fertilizer Use, Land Allocation and Forest Pressure: Evidence from Malawi’s 2009 Farm Input Subsidy Program

This thesis investigates the impacts of Malawi’s Farm Input Subsidy Program (FISP) on smallholder farmers’ behavior, decisions, and outcomes. Four phenomena are studied: (1) use of fertilizer for maize production; (2) maize yields; (3) land allocation; and (4) forest clearing. The study uses cross-sectional data from 380 farm households in Kasungu and Machinga districts of Malawi. The FISP was implemented through a voucher system that targeted deserving households based on select criteria. To study the impacts of the FISP, a two-stage regression approach is used. In the first stage, selection into the subsidy program is treated as endogenous and conditional on household- and village-specific factors. A multinomial logistic regression is used to predict the probability of participation. In the second stage, Tobit regressions are used to examine the impacts of the subsidy program on fertilizer use and forest clearing. Subsequent to this, a production function for maize is used to measure differences in maize yields between program participants and non-participants. To examine the impacts of the FISP on land allocation, a system of three land share regressions is estimated.

Results suggest that the most vulnerable people in the communities studied were not the main recipients of the coupons, contrary to program design. Nevertheless, the results suggest that the subsidy program increased fertilizer use among participating households. Fertilizer use was found to be positively correlated with maize yields. In addition, farmers who planted improved maize seeds, such as those subsidized by the FISP, obtained higher yields than those producing traditional maize. The results also show that households that received coupons for maize inputs allocated 20% more land
to maize than those that received no coupon. The analysis suggests that the program may have promoted intensification rather than extensification of maize and tobacco production in the two study areas. Households that participated in the Farm Input Subsidy Program cleared less forest land for agricultural expansion in the study year than those that did not, although those who received subsidies related to tobacco production had a program-induced derived demand for trees, which were used to construct tobacco drying sheds.

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Me and my advisers  are now working on publishing three papers (from three chapters) out of the thesis. I will continue to work on this when I get back to Malawi in a couple of weeks. I am very excited about the results and the storyline that we were able to uncover.

 

October 18, 2009

In Support of the Agricultural Input Subsidy Program but…

Posted by Chibwana Chris under Policy | Tags: , , , |
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Much has been said about the agricultural input subsidy program that was introduced by government in 2005. The success of the subsidy program, aside from pop star Madonna’s adoption of David and Mercy, is one story that has helped transform the profile of the country. It is a successful case study that is now often cited in agricultural policy classroom sessions to demonstrate to students about how governments in the developing world can help attain food security for their populace. In a world faced with widespread food shortages coupled with increasing food prices, Malawi has become an example of how sound domestic policies, rather than imported ideas, can work for the people. As a result of the successful implementation of the subsidy program, coupled with favourable weather, the country has since 2005 trebled maize production from 1.2 million tonnes to 3.4 million tonnes in the 2007/2008 agricultural season. It has never felt so good to be a Malawian.

Malawi’s recent success in turning around the agriculture sector and ensuring food security for the country has confounded critics. Economists have generally tended to regard subsidies as inefficient, expensive, socially inequitable and environmentally harmful, imposing a burden on government budgets and tax payers – all seemingly strong arguments against using them. They argue that subsidies distort prices and resource allocation decisions, thereby altering the amount of goods and services produced and consumed in an economy. A subsidy is government interference that takes money from taxpayers and gives it back to producers. While food prices tend to become lower, the savings are paid for by the taxpayer. This can be inefficient if the goal is to redistribute income as there are arguably better ways to do it, such as progressive taxation or even negative income taxes.

But how has the country gained from implementing the program? Malawi’s success in this program, against donor advice, has made the country a grain exporter and helped contain food costs. In addition, the program has helped save the country of the much needed foreign exchange. In fact, the phenomenal increase in maize production has saved the country a reported yearly budget of US$120 million that it had spent in 2005 importing food aid (was that free food?). Malawi has become a model to follow when it comes to using local policies to boost agricultural production. The emerging consensus now is that such subsidies are essential for African agriculture. As a result, last year the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization rewarded President Bingu wa Mutharika, who also serves as the country’s Minister of Agriculture, with the Agricola Prize.

The rich nations have continued to prod the poor ones (through such institutions as the IMF and World Bank) to deregulate their economies by, among other things, eliminating subsidies and opening up their borders to free trade. Ironically, this donor opposition to agricultural subsidies in Africa is coupled with refusal by rich countries to reduce their own expensive subsidies to commercial farmers in their own countries and imposing prohibitive tariffs on commodities for which they know Africa has a comparative advantage, such as sugar. Yet the case for subsidies is far more compelling for African smallholder farmers who often lack minimum access to agricultural inputs.

The justification often given for the removal of subsidies has been that, with the cost of food so cheap globally, poor nations can always buy staple goods on the world market if necessary, and so would be better off putting their farmers and farmland to more efficient use (I would also argue that the food is supposedly ‘cheap’ globally because the rich countries are subsidizing its production). But with increasing global food prices, relying on the global market to feed your own is a highly flawed undertaking.

With the rising price of oil, the United States and the EU began providing incentives for their farmers to switch production from food to biofuels. Overall, rich nations now spend as much as $15 billion annually in biofuel subsidies. In the United States alone, some 20 million acres of cropland have been converted from growing maize for food to growing maize for fuel. This number is sure to rise, since America’s Renewable Fuel Standard legislation mandates that, by 2010, at least 28 billion liters of fuel used in the country must come from non-petroleum sources. There is thus no guarantee that Malawians will be able to access maize from these countries, let alone afford the ‘oil price of maize’.

If you cannot take care of your own, do not expect others to do it for you and the president is only trying to live up to that. If the argument is that the program is so costly and a huge burden on the government budget, someone will have to tell me how cheap it is to import maize from the US or Europe. My simple back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me it is more convenient and efficient to buy fertilizer now than to compete for maize with American and European vehicles later. In Malawi, the subsidy program has more than paid for itself by reducing costs for food imports, and therefore improving the country’s balance of payments. It is a lesson to the proponents of agricultural privatization that privatizing agriculture simply does not work for African countries. Removing the input subsidy program and privatizing ADMARC is simply not an option for Malawi, especially at this time in global history. Instead of pursuing a one-size-fits-all policy in Africa, the World Bank and IMF must start looking at each country individually.

However, even supporters of increased subsidies warn that subsidies must also be sustainable, and that other factors must be considered, including the cost of imported inorganic fertilizers and long-term impacts on the environment. It is imperative on the government to strongly consider increasing funding for agricultural research, the kinds of efforts that sparked the original Green Revolution–and might just provide the country with new ways to increase crop yields. Much focus should also be placed on promoting proper food storage and processing, which would help add value to production. In addition, there is a great need to develop rural market infrastructure so that farmers get good value for their production. This includes strengthening producer groups and other rural organizations to enable them gain mastery of the market and reduce transaction costs; gain access to information on domestic, regional and international markets and facilitate technology transfer.

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August 26, 2009

Of devaluing the Kwacha

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The Malawi Kwacha

The Malawi Kwacha

The Malawi Kwacha has for the past three years been trading at K140 to the United States Dollar. In the wake of the recent global economic crisis that has seen the devaluation of some of the world’s major currencies – key among them being the United States Dollar and the British Pound Sterling, there have been calls from some sections of the Malawian society and the international donor community for the government to devalue our local currency, the Kwacha. The Bretton Woods Institutions (the World Bank and the IMF) too have been calling on the government to lessen its grip on the exchange rate. The president has however stood his ground (just as he did when he first introduced the fertilizer subsidy program) and has so far resisted all calls to devalue the Kwacha. What, though, is devaluation and what are the likely consequences of such a move? In this article I attempt to explain this and more.

The Malawi Government maintains a managed float exchange rate system, which is a hybrid of a fixed exchange rate system and a flexible exchange rate system. Unlike in a fixed rate regime, the Reserve Bank does not have an explicit set value for the currency; and unlike in a flexible exchange rate regime, it doesn’t allow the market to freely determine the value of the currency either. Instead, the Reserve Bank has either an implicit target value or an explicit range of target values for the currency, determined by pegging the Kwacha against a trade-weighted basket of currencies of the country’s major trading partners. The Bank intervenes in the foreign exchange market by buying and selling domestic and foreign currency to keep the exchange rate close to this desired implicit value or within the desired target values.

Only a decision by the government through the Reserve Bank of Malawi can thus alter the official value of the currency. The government could, if it wished, take such a measure, often in response to unusual market pressures. Devaluation, the deliberate downward adjustment in the official exchange rate, would reduce the Kwacha’s value. To illustrate, the present exchange rate is K140 to one dollar. To devalue, government, through the Reserve Bank might announce that from now on K280 will be equal to one dollar. This would make the Kwacha half as expensive to Americans or anyone intending to buy it, and the U.S. dollar twice as expensive to Malawians.

Under what circumstances might a government devalue its currency? It is often because the interaction of market forces and policy decisions has made the currency’s fixed exchange rate untenable. In order to sustain a fixed exchange rate, a country must have sufficient foreign exchange reserves, often dollars, and be willing to spend them, to purchase all offers of its currency at the established exchange rate. When a country is unable or unwilling to do so, then it must devalue its currency to a level that it is able and willing to support with its foreign exchange reserves. Going back home, there have been numerous cries about the shortage of foreign currency in the country, which climaxed with the arrests of several people suspected of externalizing forex and the closure of all unlicensed forex bureaus which were thought to be hoarding forex. This is one of the reasons why the aforementioned stakeholders have been calling for the devaluation of the Kwacha.

A key effect of devaluation is that it makes the domestic currency cheaper relative to other currencies. There are two implications of a devaluation. First, devaluation makes the country’s exports relatively less expensive for foreigners. This would seem to be consistent with the president’s vision of turning Malawi into a net exporter as it would drive up exports. Second, the devaluation makes foreign products relatively more expensive for domestic consumers, thus discouraging imports. This may help to increase the country’s exports and decrease imports, and may therefore help to reduce the current account deficit.

However, the president’s argument has been that devaluing the currency will make things more expensive for the average Malawian. “Devaluation of the kwacha would only benefit a few people, and most of them are not even Malawians,” the president is quoted as saying. “On the other hand, devaluation would impact badly on poor people as it would increase prices of commodities… the cost of raw materials and equipment importation for companies.” This is a highly valid argument as a significant risk is that by increasing the price of imports and stimulating greater demand for domestic products, devaluation can aggravate inflation. If this happens, the government may have to raise interest rates to control inflation, eventually slowing down economic growth.

One other risk of devaluation is psychological. Often times devaluation is seen as a sign of economic weakness. This would place the creditworthiness of the nation at risk. As a result, devaluation may lower investor confidence in the country’s economy and may reduce the country’s ability to secure foreign investment.

The government is thus faced with a tough choice here. In the end, it all depends on who has the most votes as the issue of devaluing the Kwacha becomes more of a political decision than an economic one. The business community, who the president argued he is trying to protect too, wants assurance that there will be enough foreign currency reserves in the country. I would not be surprised if I found the Kwacha still trading at K140 to the US$ come the World Cup in 2010!

This article was also published in Malawi’s Daily Times newspaper and the online Nyasa Times (http://www.nyasatimes.com/columns/of-devaluing-the-malawi-kwacha.html)

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April 3, 2009

On Africa and Development Aid

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Greetings once again. Today I decided to share my view of development aid. There is this other Zambian-born-dead-aid1Havard-trained economist by the name of Dambisa Moyo who has authored a book on development-related aid. Her book, titled “Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa” has generated a lot of discussion about the effectiveness of aid to Africa. In her book, Ms. Moyo argues that despite rich countries having transferred to Africa more than $1 trillion in development-related aid over the past fifty years, this assistance has not improved the lives of Africans. In fact, she argues, across the continent the recipients of this aid are not better off as a result of it, but worse—much worse.

To me, it was high time one bold African stood up to challenge the aid theories of the west. I have always believed that the solution to Africa’s problems does not lie in ‘free’ money from western governments. Unfortunately, our African leaders have been blinded by this greatest myth of development of our time. As a result of this misconception, the majority of African countries, Malawi inclusive, have been trapped in this vicious circle of aid dependency. In Malawi, for instance, more than 40% of the government budget is donor money. We have been receiving aid since the early 80s, but what have we got to show for it?

The irony of the EU and US

The EU and the US are top in subsidizing their farmers

It is for such reasons that I welcomed the debate raised by Ms. Moyo through her book. In my opinion, the rich countries offer aid to Africa as compensation for the unfair trade practices they promote. It is common knowledge that almost all of the rich countries subsidize their rich farmers. This essentially means the cost of producing food in rich countries is very low and so the farmers can afford to market their produce at ridiculously low prices. Because these farmers produce more than what their countries need due to the low production cost, these cheap products are in turn dumped to Africa to compete against the African smallholder farmer’s output. What’s worse – the rich countries, led by the U.S. and the EU, have been aggressively pushing  for more trade liberalisation at a time of global crises of food and fuel. The result is that the African farmers have been affected by falling commodity prices, especially of agricultural products.

A fairer global trade system would be more useful to African nations than aid, which often times ends up in the private bank accounts of presidents and/or their accomplices. Producer subsidies in the United States and Europe are threatening Africa’s agricultural industry, and these subsidies drive the African producers out of the global market, exacerbating poverty as a result. Instead of giving “free money” to Africa, the continent’s trading partners could help by working out measures that would promote demand for the continent’s products. Fair trade, NOT aid is the solution to Africa’s poverty. Let Africa trade its products with the rest of the world at competitive prices – the benefits from such a move far outweigh any amount of development aid to the continent.

 

March 20, 2009

Greetings and welcome

Posted by Chibwana Chris under March 2009 | Tags: , , , , |
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Moni nonse (greetings everybody)! I would like to introduce you to my blog. This is my very first attempt at establishing a formal blog. I figured out I have a lot of stories about my life and my career that I would like to tell but I just do not have the right platform to do it. This blog therefore is meant to dig into my real personal experiences, which I hope you will be able to relate to. That said, here we go with my first blog!

I am one of the privileged few who have been able to study past their first degree at a very prestigious institution like Purdue University. I consider myself very fortunate to have had that opportunity. The one major difference that I noted between graduate school back home and here at Purdue is the emphasis that is placed on continuous assessment. At Purdue, much of the semester is spent doing homeworks and term papers. I hardly have time to simply sit down and read a book for the sake of reading. If there is no assignment due that week for a specific course, then there is some exam or quiz in that course. Coming from a background that placed much focus on mid-term and final exams, I had a really hard time adjusting to the American system.

It is a good system in that you are forced to learn the material immediately after it is given out in class by the professor, sometimes even before. The MS program in Agricultural Economics is quantitatively rigorous, you need a really good background in calculus and statistics. Despite all that, I am enjoying it. If I ever happened to work as a lecturer sometime in the future, I have learnt a lot of things that would help make my job very effective. This, though, does not mean that I despise the Malawian education system. Frankly, it is the best given the amount of resources that are invested in it. Were it that our educational system was poor, I would not have been successful at Purdue, let alone make it past the selection process.

That said, my view is that a lot can be done to our tertiary education system to make it highly competitive in this 21st century. It is a known fact that the University of Malawi thrives primarily on public money. What I have seen during my stay here is that alumni play a hugely significant role in financing the university. I can not enumerate how many buildings at Purdue that have been donated by former students of the university. Don’t we have University of Malawi alumni who can do the same? You do not have to be filthy rich to assist develop education at your old school which is almost collapsing due to lack of funding. The issue is all about patriotism. In Malawi, once people get their papers from the University, the majority do not care what happens after they are gone – how the plates and cups that they broke during their stay at the university will be replaced, in what state the 2009 economics student will find the 1985 edition of Alpha C. Chiang that they used in 1990, etc. It is that patriotic spirit that makes these other countries and their universities stand out, not the amount of wealth their people have. And speaking of wealth, how do we expect a nation to develop if the people that have all the money now are not willing to share with those that do not have but have the potential to make even more money in future? How many of the people that got the government college loans have paid back a Tambala? And yet we expect to develop education standards in our colleges? We all have to be responsible for the collapse of standards in our colleges.

Once again welcome to my new blog. Thank you for visiting, and please come back soon!