This Gender Assessment of the USAID/Malawi portfolio is intended to assist the mission in integrating gender into program planning, project design, procurement, implementation, reporting, and monitoring and evaluation. It discusses how the Government of Malawi (GOM) is addressing gender issues through its Revised National Gender Policy and ways that USAID can support the GOM in achieving its goals.

This presentation explains how the Safe Schools Program is helping to prevent child marriage in Malawi. It profiles several young girls who the Safe Schools Program helped stay or re-enroll in school. A total of 35 child marriages were avoided between October and December 2007.

This map shows the location of the Safe Schools Program intervention district, Machinga. It also provides a list of the 30 intervention schools and 10 control schools in the Machinga district.

This report presents the findings and recommendations of a school-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) assessment conducted in Malawi by a team from the Washington, DC-based Safe Schools Program. The team summarizes the general issues and recommendations as reported by NGO staff, USAID implementing partners of the Malawi Education Support Activity, Malawian educational personnel, and local schoolteachers, parents and students, augmenting these issues and recommendations based on the global literature on best practices. After analyzing the data and general recommendations, the team identified eight priority issues and recommendations that are proposed as the Safe Schools pilot program in Malawi.

The Safe Schools Program was a five-year initiative (2003-2008) funded by the USAID Office of Women in Development and implemented by DevTech Systems, Inc. The goal of Safe Schools was to reduce school-related gender-based violence in selected schools in Ghana and Malawi to support the longer-term goal of improving educational outcomes and reducing negative health outcomes for schoolchildren. Changes in student and teacher knowledge, attitudes, and practices were used to measure progress toward reducing gender violence. Safe Schools was one of the first programs to systematically use a gender approach to identify the relationship between the traditional definition of gender roles and the types of abuse and violence that both girls and boys suffer from and perpetrate in schools.

The objective of Safe Schools is to create safe environments for both girls and boys that promote gender-equitable relationships and reduce school-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) by working in partnership with children, youth, parents, teachers, schools and communities. This report summarizes the results of the participatory learning and action research activity conducted in October and November 2005 to help raise awareness, involvement, and accountability at national, institutional, community and individual levels of SRGBV in the Machinga District in southern Malawi. The study revealed a lack of knowledge about school-related gender-based violence in communities in the Machinga District; however, it also found that all schools in the study have some kind of reporting structure in place in the event that violence against children occurs.

This document presents the quantitative research instruments used to examine school-related gender-based violence in schools in Malawi. The study was carried out by DevTech Systems, Inc. and the Centre for Educational Research and Training through the USAID-funded Safe Schools Program. The document contains a suggested sampling methodology, interview guides, and suggested preliminary data analysis.

This Safe Schools Program report presents results from a baseline survey conducted among school children and teachers in the Machinga District in the Southern Region of Malawi in April 2006. Selected from a random sample, 800 boys and girls and 288 teachers at 40 participating schools were interviewed. They were asked about the type of violence, abuse, and mistreatment that boys and girls experience at school; who is responsible for this mistreatment; where this mistreatment occurs; if there are other school practices or conditions that are inappropriate, place pupils at risk, or potentially interfere with their schooling; and the effectiveness of reporting.