The Malawi Inclusive Education Advocacy Project (MIEAP) led by Civil Society Education Coalition (CSEC) aims at addressing the challenge of limited access and retention of children with disabilities and girls in Dedza and Mangochi districts in Malawi. CSEC has identified three main areas of which challenges to the access and retention in education persists. These are:

• Education financing: Inadequate domestic financing has put an increasing financial burden on households. Especially households in rural areas are disproportionately affected, where app. 80 pct. of the population lives for under 1 USD a day.
• Social exclusion of girls and children with disabilities: Girls and children with disabilities in rural communities of Malawi are exposed to social, economic, and cultural barriers that hinder their access to education, decrease retention, and lead to low transition from primary education to secondary education.
• Limited space for inclusive education sector dialogues: Various policy platforms like TWG’s, SWGs, JSR, LEG, and thematic groups exist at both national and district levels, enabling CSO participation. However, a critical challenge is the limited representation of CSOs in these platforms. This limitation hampers meaningful sector dialogues on inclusive education.

To address the above challenges, the project aims at strengthening CSEC’s engagement in inclusive and gender responsive education policy development, implementation, and monitoring in Malawi.

CSEC has three overall change pathways to achieve the goals of the project. They entail:

1. Making the CSEC more inclusive and well-coordinated to effectively engage in national policy setting, monitoring, and accountability, by mobilising more organisations at local, district and national level, as well as amplify the voice of girls and children with disability.
2. Build the capacity of the Coalition in participation and strategic development, implementation, and monitoring of education policies, particularly to promote inclusive and gender responsive education policies. This part will particularly focus on improved access to education service delivery for girls and children with special needs.
3. Strengthen knowledge and learning through National Learning Collaboratives to generate and share knowledge and to capacitate civil society organisations, particularly in relation to the promotion of social accountability, inclusion, and gender equality. By tapping into the members’ diversities and different competencies the coalitions’ ability to hold the government accountable to its commitments will be enhanced.

In the long term the project is expected to contribute to increased enrolment rates for girls and children with disabilities in targeted schools, as well as a decreasing retention and drop-out rates for girls and children with disabilities in the upper classes.

Apart from strengthening CSEC in Malawi in inclusive and gender responsive education policy development, implementation, and monitoring, the project also seeks to empower citizens to actively monitor and enhance accountability mechanisms in education, with a focus on access and retention of girls and children with disabilities. Further, the project will hold duty bearers accountable to ensure free and quality inclusive primary education in line with SDG 4, Malawi's National Inclusive Education Policy, and the National Strategy on Inclusive Education.

A previous phase of the project was carried out between April 2022 – December 2023. The current project is part of the EOL extension phase of 2024-2026. Read more about the previous phase of the project here.