Volunteer Teachers, Volunteer Teaching Assistants, and/or Volunteer Teacher Trainers for Primary Schools, Nursery Schools and Secondary School(s), Malawi, Africa

Who:
Qualified volunteer teachers or volunteer trainee teachers of any subject at any level, although we will also consider applicants who have been educated to degree level. However, we do recommend that those volunteers who are not qualified teachers or trainee teachers study for a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) or TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) qualification if at all possible. It is important to have a genuine interest in making a worthwhile contribution and the ability to live in a rural environment while establishing a solid relationship with the local community. Enthusiasm for working with young people is also essential.

Placement Length:
We would prefer our volunteers to make a commitment of a minimum of three months to coincide with the school term times (see Term Dates below), although shorter stays can be arranged (see note about short stays on the Volunteering: An Introduction webpage). It is important to recognise that, although the volunteers will benefit enormously from their experience at Mwaya, our main responsibility is to provide consistent and effective assistance to the community.

Programme Coordination:
It is very important to maintain consistency and continuity in relationships, projects and work already underway and, to this end, we have an Education Coordinator (who is also a teacher at Mwaya Primary School), a Nursery Schools Coordinator, and a Volunteer Projects Manager at Mwaya Beach who is responsible for volunteers. The Education Coordinator will introduce arriving volunteers to the primary school(s) and the teachers, the Nursery Schools Coordinator will show them around the nursery schools RIPPLE Africa supports in the area, and the Volunteer Projects Manager will make sure new volunteers visit the secondary school at Kapanda and the community library and that they know about the various projects, clubs and groups that are running.

Term Dates:
There are three school terms during the year for both primary and secondary schools and, up until November 2009, the academic year started in January. However, in November 2009, the government announced that they were returning to the old system and that the academic year would start in September each year. This has meant that the term dates have been changed radically to accommodate this change and, for the year 2009/2010, the term dates are as follows:

– Term 1: 7 December 2009 to 19 February 2010
– Term 2: 8 March 2010 to 21 May 2010
– Term 3: 7 June 2010 to 6 August 2010

It is expected that Term 1 for the 2010/2011 academic year will start in mid/late September 2010 but, unfortunately, it is not possible to get exact term dates in advance as the government does not release them until a few weeks before each term begins.

If your placement period includes one or more of the term breaks, please be aware that there will be less or no work to do at the schools, although volunteers can and do organise additional clubs and classes for the holiday periods. However, we suggest that this is the best time to arrange any trips you might want to take (see Travel and Holidays in Malawi and Other Neighbouring Countries).

At the primary schools, only Standards 1 to 7 attend school in Term 3 as Standard 8 pupils finish their primary education after taking their primary school leaving examinations in late June/early July. However, all Standard 8 students have lessons throughout the term breaks after Terms 1 and 2.

At secondary schools, Form 2 students take their Junior Certificate of Education (JCE) exams in Term 3 and do not return to school until the beginning of the following academic year. Form 4 students take their Malawi Secondary Certificate of Education (MSCE) and have officially finished their secondary education once their exams are over.

Mwaya Primary School and Other Local Primary Schools

Primary schools in Malawi are free and open to all. As secondary education is highly competitive and relatively expensive, this is often the only education rural Malawians receive. It is not uncommon for students in Standard 8 to be as old as 15 or 16 while studying to re-sit their primary school leaving exams.

Mwaya Primary School has about 800-850 pupils from the local community, and is a ten-minute walk from Mwaya Beach. While there should be one teacher for each Standard (1-8), there is currently a shortage in Malawi and there are only six fully trained Government paid teachers at the school. In addition, RIPPLE Africa is paying five Malawian trainee teachers to assist them. Class sizes can be as large as 70-100 although official enrolment can be as high as 150 per class. Teachers, especially in the higher levels, are under enormous pressure to cover a wide-ranging curriculum with very limited resources and time. Despite this, pupils are generally motivated and enthusiastic.

There are also opportunities to help at two or three other local primary schools, namely, Mazembe, Matete, and Kachere. These schools are further from Mwaya Beach than Mwaya Primary School, but they can be reached on a bicycle quite easily. As with Mwaya Primary School, there is a high number of students and only a few government teachers. RIPPLE Africa pays for Malawian trainee teachers at these schools as well.

This volunteer opportunity is a cooperative initiative that involves evaluating the needs of the school with the current volunteers, our Education Coordinator, the headmaster, classroom teachers, and trainee teachers in tailoring your responsibilities to best meet these, taking into account your special skills and interests. This might mean helping the class teacher with marking the pupils' work, which may not sound very inspiring but will give you a good insight into the children's abilities (or lack of them) and will help the teacher tremendously as marking upwards of 50 pupils' work each day takes a lot of their time. You might also help with teaching English and science to Standards 5, 6, and 7, or maths, English and geography to Standards 7 and 8 each day. Working hours and days off are arranged with the Education Coordinator and the headmaster.

During the holidays and in the afternoons in term time, it is possible to organise special tutorials or holiday classes at the primary school. These can follow the main curriculum or be as diverse and varied as your own imagination. As the school operates on an absolute bare-bones budget, however, volunteers should plan to provide any materials or equipment required for these courses or extra-curricular activities.

If you are interested in volunteering at the primary school, please read the document called Information for Teaching Volunteers: Primary Schools for more details.

Nursery Schools

We want to recruit overseas volunteers who would be interested in helping at one or more of the nursery schools and/or who would be able to give the teachers some additional training in teaching young children of nursery school age. RIPPLE Africa supports six nursery schools in the area and, until recently, the teachers were unpaid and untrained volunteers from the community. Thanks to the generosity of one of our donors, we are now able to pay the teachers a salary. Also, we are able to fund teacher training courses for them all at least once a year. The nursery schools play a very important role in giving children aged two to five or six years old a sound grounding in the basics (i.e. numbers, the alphabet, English, etc.) before they start their primary education.

If you are interested in volunteering at the nursery schools, please read the document called Information for Teaching Volunteers: Nursery Schools for more details.

Secondary School(s)

Kapanda Community Day Secondary School (CDSS), which is about 30 minutes’ bicycle ride from Mwaya Beach, opened for Form 1 early in 2008. The second double classroom block and a second teacher’s house were completed at the end of 2008, and a building comprising teachers' offices and a secure storeroom was in use by March 2009. Now this school is open, there are many opportunities for volunteers to assist the teachers, particularly with English, maths, and the science subjects.

In 2005, two volunteers, who are post-doctoral graduates in maths and biochemistry, respectively, taught at Mwaya Primary School and also at one of the local secondary schools. In addition, they organised a two-week course in maths, biology, physics, and chemistry for secondary school teachers, which they ran with a third volunteer. Since then, we have had a few post-doctoral graduate volunteers who have been keen to teach the teachers and, through trial and error, we have found that the best way to do this is to go to the local secondary schools and arrange in-house teacher training at each school.

If you are interested in volunteering at the secondary school, please read the document called Teaching Experiences at Mwaya which was written by these volunteers at the end of 2005.

It is also possible to organise special tutorials or holiday classes for secondary school students during the holidays and in the afternoons in term time. These can follow the main curriculum or be as diverse and varied as your own imagination.

How to apply: Click here.

Clubs and Groups

There are a number of clubs and groups organised by previous volunteers which are either still running or which have been discontinued, and we hope future volunteers will be willing to lead or reinstate one or more of these. Some do require funding, while others just need imagination and initiative. Examples of some of these are listed below:

Education Video

Information for Teaching Volunteers: Primary Schools

Information for Teaching Volunteers: Nursery Schools

Teaching Experiences at Mwaya

Application Form
(please read The Application Process before completing this form)